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Wednesday, September 17. 2014

Every year dozens of books are published about a topic that only a
handful of Americans care about: specifically, those with cushy "think
tank" jobs, plus a few military officers and State department bureaucrats
who aspire to those jobs. Most assume that the US has a rightful role
running the World Order, with some fretting that China or some other
nation is going to butt in and offering sage advice on how the US can
secure its rightful role. Against these stalwart hegemonists, now and
then someone will argue that a "multipolar" isn't such a calamity, but
they are in the minority, and are still so obsessed with dominance
they needn't fear about losing their status as Very Serious Thinkers.

The books, of course, are nonsense, predicated on unexamined ideas:
that chaos and war are the natural state of the world, that order is so
valuable you have to accept it from whoever can impose it, that inequality
is the best we can do given man's venal nature. That is, of course, the
way conservatives think about everything. Unfortunately, it is also the
way liberals usually think about the foreign world, given how readily
they have sucked up the prejudices of the West's imperial past. In 2003
Jonathan Schell published an antidote to that kind of thinking, a book
called The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of
the People. It was published just as the neocon ideology had become
fashionable and powerful enough to "create new reality" in Iraq, and
predicted failure for such hubris. Ten years later the results should
be clear, but still the foreign policy elite natters on, too absorbed
in their own prejudiced thoughts to have noticed their failures.

Case in point: a new book called World Order by America's
most venerable war criminal, Henry Kissinger. Fortunately, we don't
have to actually read the book: we can skim through the New York
Times'
review by John Micklethwait -- editor-in-chief of The Economist,
the kind of journalist who makes his living chronicling the rarefied
world of conservative "think tanks." (Micklethwait's most famous book
is The Right Nation: Conservative Power in America, which every
4-5 pages reiterated the mantra that conservatives are America's "idea
people." He also wrote A Future Perfect: The Challenge and Hidden
Promise of Globalization [2001] and God Is Back: How the Global
Revival of Faith Is Changing the World [2009], extolling the wonders
of free capital flows and fundamentalism, respectively. His latest is
The Fourth Revolution: The Global Race to Reinvent the State,
about how the future belongs to oligarchies that are able to usurp the
powers of the state.) Rarely has reviewer and subject been so perfectly
matched to bring out the worst in a book.

However, before we dive into the review, I should point out that
there is an alternative approach to international relations that is
wholly absent in the thinking of Kissinger and Micklethwait: the
idea that order can be obtained through the consent of equal nations
with a common commitment to basic, inalienable human rights and a
just body of international law. In the wake of two horrific world
wars, and the advent of even more destructive nuclear weapons, that
idea got so far as the founding documents of the United Nations --
before that body got turned into a cartel of superpowers -- and the
basic ideas have reappeared occasionally since. I could elaborate
more, but for now just keep the idea in mind.

The first quarter of Micklethwait's review is sheer flattery:

If you want to understand the point of Henry Kissinger, play this
mind game: Imagine that the nonagenarian had run American foreign
policy since Sept. 11, 2001, instead of two groups that had spent much
of the previous quarter-century condemning him. First came the
democracy-touting neoconservatives, who saw his realpolitik as
appeasement, and now liberal Democrats, who insist nation-building
must begin at home -- and therefore hate foreign entanglements, let
alone grand strategies.

Might a little realism have been useful in Iraq, rather than the
"stuff happens" amateurism of the Bush years? Would a statesman who
read Winston Churchill on Afghanistan ("except at harvest time
. . . the Pathan [Pashtun] tribes are always engaged in private or
public war") have committed America to establishing a "gender
sensitive . . . and fully representative" government in Kabul? Would
Kissinger have issued a red-line warning to Syria and then allowed
Assad to go unpunished when he used chemical weapons? Or let a power
vacuum gradually develop on Vladimir Putin's borders? Or looked on as
the South China Sea became a cockpit of regional rivalries?
[ . . . ]

Yes, passion, for this is a cri de coeur from a famous
skeptic, a warning to future generations from an old man steeped in
the past. It comes with faults: It is contorted by the author's
concerns about his legacy and by a needless craving not to upset the
Lilliputian leaders he still seeks to influence. It also goes over
some of the same ground as previous works. But it is a book that every
member of Congress should be locked in a room with -- and forced to
read before taking the oath of office.

It's not as if Kissinger didn't have the ear of the Bush Administration
after 9/11. He was, after all, Bush's first pick to chair the commission
that would report on the 9/11 attacks. (He turned the job down for fear
of having to disclose who his consulting clients were.) If he had any
reservations about Bush's approach to Iraq or anything, he was remarkably
circumspect about voicing them. And since when has Churchill been an
expert on anything? He always said he hadn't been elected to preside
over the dismantling of the British Empire, but no one did more to wreck
it, which he repeatedly did by insisting on substituting his prejudices
for any understanding of or empathy for the empire's subjects. On the
other hand, Kissinger's own record is nearly as bad. The suggestion
that he would have handled Syria and Ukraine better than Obama has --
admittedly a low bar -- overlooks how much his own policies contributed
to those conflicts today.

The premise is that we live in a world of disorder:
[ . . . ] Hence the need to build an order -- one
able to balance the competing desires of nations, both the established
Western powers that wrote the existing international "rules"
(principally the United States), and the emerging ones that do not
accept them, principally China, but also Russia and the Islamic
world.

This will be hard because there never has been a true world
order. Instead, different civilizations have come up with their own
versions. The Islamic and Chinese ones were almost entirely
self-­centered: [ . . . ] America's version,
though more recent and more nuanced, is also somewhat self-centered --
a moral order where everything will be fine once the world comes to
its senses and thinks like America (which annoyingly it never quite
does). So the best starting point remains Europe's "Westphalian"
balance of power.

The Westphalia treaties ended the 30 Years War in 1648 with a set
of agreements between nations/states/cities to respect each other's
autonomy and work with each other in prescribed ways. This later led
to an ever-adjusting set of alliances to maintain a balance of power --
which mostly worked to keep the peace in Europe (and to export war to
the third world) until its colossal failure in 1914. Kissinger always
thinks in the past, and far enough back as to ignore recent novelties
like the European Union, so balance of power is the best he can do.
Unlike the neocons, he recognizes that the US isn't the sole power in
the world, one suspects this has less to do with realism than with
the fact that it takes multiple powers to balance.

After all, while the neocons hate Kissinger, he has never really
reciprocated. The reason, I think, is that both worship power. It's
just that the neocons think they have so much power they can create
their own reality, and Kissinger, well, he's never been to type to
point out "the Emperor's new clothes" -- he's too much of a flatterer
for that, too worshipful of power.

The review goes on and on iterating Kissinger's past examples, a
litany of Richelieu, Metternich, Palmerston, Talleyrand -- curiously
enough, courtiers like Kissinger and not the monarchs they served.
Kissinger goes on to belittle the European Union:

. . . as Kissinger notes in one of his more withering asides,
unifications in Europe have only been achieved with a forceful uniter,
like Piedmont in Italy or Prussia in Germany.

For Kissinger, historical change not accomplished by force hardly
counts. Then he explains Putin and Russia:

Kissinger also canters eloquently through Russia. Vladimir Putin's
nationalism makes more sense once you understand the historical chip
on his shoulder and his country's centuries-long, remorseless
expansion: Russia added an average of 100,000 square kilometers a year
to its territory from 1552 to 1917.

Again, nothing like a historical factoid to explain away current
behavior or policy. This one is about as facile as trying to explain
the Bush occupation of Iraq as the latest wrinkle on Manifest Destiny.
It may indeed be that a nation capable of the former is predisposed
to the latter, but that leaves a lot of intervening history unexamined
in favor of a pat answer.

Still, the book stalls a bit with Islam. Religion used to be one of
Kissinger's blind spots: The word does not appear in the index of
Diplomacy. Now Kissinger seems to have swung too far the other
way. Islam's failure to differentiate between mosque and state suddenly
explains virtually everything (though not, presumably, the success of
the largest Muslim-dominated state, Indonesia). Iran is perfidy
personified. By contrast, Israel is a victim, "a Westphalian state" in
a sea of unreason. He does not mention its unhelpful settlement-building
or examine the Jewish state's own extremists (the man who killed the
peacemaking Yitzhak Rabin is a "radical Israeli student"). It all feels
like a rather belated olive branch to the Israeli right and its supporters
in America's Congress.

I suppose this is where you notice that Micklethwait is British: he
can't quite fall for the poor, tiny, beleaguered Israel line that is
political orthodoxy in the US. Kissinger has been around the block
enough to know better too, but to say so would take principles, or
courage, neither a Kissinger staple. Propounding ignorance about
Islam, on the other hand, takes neither. It's right up his alley.

The book recovers speed with Asia. Kissinger compares Britain's
effect on India to Napoleon's on Germany: In both cases multiple
states that had seen themselves only as a geographic entity discovered
a national one.

Another remarkable example of Kissinger's ability to look at al
the complexities of history and only see power relationships, then
to take the narrowest thread and explicate it through some totally
unrelated event in European history. Sure, Britain united India
politically -- more Bismarck than Napoleon, I'd say, until they
also split it into two warring halves -- but they also destroyed
India economically. (One thing I wonder is whether Kissinger would
have been so successful had stayed in Europe, where his audiences
and patrons might actually know much of the history he revels in.)

There is some repetition here with his last book on China, but he
moves quickly through the Middle Kingdom's self-absorbed history,
where foreign policy was largely a matter of collecting tribute
through the emperor's Ministry of Rituals and where soldiery was
little valued ("Good iron is not used for nails. Good men do not
become soldiers"). In 1893, even as Western forces were overrunning
the country, the Qing dynasty diverted military funds to restore a
marble boat in the Imperial Palace.

Middle Kingdom? Another example of forcing the present into the
distant past so he can avoid having to understand what's happening
there. I like the line -- "Good men do not become soldiers" -- but
modern China does not lack for soldiers, or for nails. While modern
China must in some sense continue to reflect and resonate ancient
China, the nation's remarkable economic growth of the past 20-30
years is more due to forced modernization. This is a modern (perhaps
even postmodern) phenomenon -- unexplainable through ancient history,
but also non-analogous to the processes that created similar results
in Europe and America. In particular, China (and most of East Asia,
Japan a partial exception) achieved its wealth without building on
imperialism, so is unlikely to look at the world the same way Europe
and America do. Needless to say, that's a thought Kissinger is
incapable of.

Is modern America capable of leading the world out of this?
Kissinger never answers this question directly, but the chapters on
his own country read like a carefully worded warning to a treasured
but blinkered friend. America comes to the task with two deep
character faults. The first, bound up with its geography, is a
perception that foreign policy is "an optional activity." As late as
1890, its army was only the 14th largest in the world, smaller than
Bulgaria's. This is a superpower that has withdrawn ignominiously from
three of the last five wars it chose to fight -- in Vietnam, Iraq (the
younger Bush version), Afghanistan. The second is that the same ideals
that have built a great country often made it lousy at diplomacy,
especially "the conviction that its domestic principles were
self-evidently universal and their application at all times salutary"
-- the naïveté of Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations and the
neoconservatives' forays in the Islamic world.
[ . . . ]

But the current disorder is more complex: chaos in the Middle East,
the spread of nuclear weapons, the emergence of cyberspace as an
unregulated military arena and the reordering of Asia. The challenge is
"not simply a multipolarity of power but a world of increasingly
contradictory realities," Kissinger writes. "It must not be assumed that,
left unattended, these trends will at some point reconcile automatically
to a world of balance and cooperation -- or even any order at all."
[ . . . ]

How do America's current leaders shape up? Here the book is both
irritatingly coy and implicitly devastating. There is no direct
criticism of the Obama administration and even a slightly comic
paragraph expressing Kissinger's deep personal admiration for George
W. Bush -- in the midst of a section on the cluelessness of his foreign
policy. But under the equivocation and the courtiership, the message
is clear, even angry: The world is drifting, unattended, and America,
an indispensable part of any new order, has yet to answer even basic
questions, like "What do we seek to prevent?" and "What do we seek to
achieve?"

One of my favorite rock lyrics is from the band Camper van Beethoven,
and goes like this: "If you weren't living here in America/you'd probably
be somewhere else." There are several problems with being self-centered.
One is that you can't see yourself as others see you, and as such you
have no clue when you do something wrong. Back when the US army was
smaller than Bulgaria's it still did things that were wrong -- 1890,
the very year Micklethwait cites, was the date of the Wounded Knee
Massacre -- but those wrong things were much smaller in scope and more
isolated from the rest of the world than they are today. I don't know
why Kissinger/Micklethwait complained about the size of the 1890 army.
Back then, the US was already the most prosperous nation in the world,
without getting into the trap of managing overseas colonies (although
it often treated Central America like one). Nor was the US isolated:
with the possible exception of the UK, no nation traded more all around
the world. What more do they want?

The notion of America as an "indispensable nation" dates from WWII,
when latent industrial might turned the tables against the Axis --
although we conveniently forget that most of the actual fighting was
carried out by the Soviet Union and China. Unfortunately, Americans
had too good a time in that war -- a massive Keynesian stimulus,
strict profit controls, and a sense of common purpose pushed a
previously depressed economy into overdrive, while all of the war's
destruction took place elsewhere. By the time the war was over, over
half of the world's industrial capacity resided in the US, and America
alone had the financial power to jumpstart the world economy. After
some early gestures to build a peaceful world community, Truman got
distracted and decided that the US should side with capital in the
international class war, so efforts like the Marshall Plan were turned
into political weapons against not just the Soviet Union but the whole
working class. The "Cold War" somehow managed not to destroy the world,
but the US repeatedly supported desperate attempts by colonial powers
to recapture their empires, and corrupt dictators and oligarchs when
independence was inevitable, while isolating nations that had the gall
to turn toward communism. Ultimately, the big loser of the Cold War
wasn't the Soviet Union, which gave up the game, but America's own
middle class democracy.

Micklethwait, possibly echoing but at least distilling Kissinger,
described the Cold War thusly:

In the Cold War, America's moral order worked: There was a clear
adversary that could eventually just be outmuscled, there were
compliant allies and there were set rules of engagement.

After the Soviet Union fell, America's foreign policy elites were
beside themselves with triumphal glee -- proclaiming The End of
History and looking forward to The Clash of Civilizations --
but their triumph was little more than a con. Had Reagan's rhetoric
caused the Soviet Union to disintegrate, why did communist states the
US confronted much more aggressively (like Cuba and North Korea) stay
communist? If communism was a dead end, how was China able to post
the world's strongest economic growth record over the last 25 years?
Moreover, when you sift through the real rubble of the "Cold War"
you find enormous chasms where the US took the wrong side of history
and left enormous destruction in its wake: the "chaos in the Middle
East" that Micklethwait bemoans is largely the result of America's
Cold War embrace of Salafist jihadism -- a program, by the way,
initiated in the 1970s when Henry Kissinger came up with the bright
idea of propping the ultraconservative Saudi monarchy up as a US
proxy in the Middle East (and soon thereafter Afghanistan). To say
"America's moral order worked" is well beyond insane.

This isn't to say that the US should have no role in the world
(although that would clearly be an improvement over the one the US
has practiced for nearly seventy years now). Clearly there are
useful and valuable things a large and rich nation can do in the
world -- the $750 million Obama just proposed to fight the ebola
epidemic is a nice gesture (although, as
Nick Turse recently documented, the US has a terrible track
record of running "humanitarian projects" in Africa). But what
needs to be done is for the US to meet other countries in forums
that give everyone a fair and equal shake, and for that to happen
the US has to stop throwing its weight around, trying to bully
everyone else into submission. More specifically, the US needs to
develop a genuine commitment to peace and human rights, to equality
and justice, to a sustainable stewardship of the earth. To do that,
a good first step would be to stop listening to Henry Kissinger.
In fact, a good step would be to extradite him to the Hague, to
finally be tried as the war criminal he was (and is).

Thursday, July 3. 2014

Last
New Book Notes was on April 2, the one before that on
February 11, so this is about when I should be coming up
with another collection of forty blurbs. If anything, I'm a
little late, but then I always seem to be late. Actually, I
have another batch of forty in the draft file, so I may well
come up with a second post this week.

Anyhow, these are the most interesting titles I've noticed on
real and virtual bookstore shelves recently:

Julia Angwin: Dragnet Nation: A Quest for Privacy, Security,
and Freedom in a World of Relentless Surveillance (2014,
Times Books): A journalist surveys the surveillance nation -- not
just the NSA but your phone company and Google too -- senses that
the response to surveillance will be self-censorship to the point
of losing freedom, and tries to figure out ways to cope, even to
carve out some measure of privacy.

Gary J Bass: The Blood Telegram: Nixon, Kissinger, and a
Forgotten Genocide (2013, Knopf): About the 1971 revolt and
war that split Bangladesh off from Pakistan, and how Nixon and Kissinger
were so wrapped up in their Cold War machinations they didn't notice
(nor did they care) that millions of people were perishing. Bass has
a rotten history as one of those liberal hawks who invariably wants
the US to jump into wars everywhere there's a chance to save lives,
and this is a case that suits him to a T. (As I recall, Noam Chomsky
cited India's intervention as one of the very few cases where a war
actually did some good.) And it never hurts to be reminded that Nixon
and Kissinger were war criminals of the highest order. Still, beware
the hidden agenda.

Michael Burleigh: Small Wars, Faraway Places: Global Insurrection
and the Making of the Modern World, 1945-1965 (2013, Viking):
Given the years covered, most of those faraway wars were revolts against
European (and American) imperialism, many of which got caught up in the
Cold War as the United States forsake liberalism in favor of any tinpot
despot who could be counted as anticommunist. That adds up to a pretty
big book (668 pp) with "18 distinct story lines of terrorism,
counter-terrorism, intrigue, nationalism, and Cold War rivalry."
Good chance he spreads himself thin, as well as missing the upshot --
which is that the Cold War was primarily responsible for undermining
democracy and undoing the middle class in America.

Tyler Cowen: Average Is Over: Powering America Beyond the
Age of the Great Stagnation (2013, Dutton): New York Times
pundit, on the conservative side, does at least approach real problems
while denying that they can be fixed (often by reassuring us that the
right people are working on it). E.g., his brief on the economic
decline of the middle class was The Great Stagnation: How America
Ate All the Low-Hanging Fruit of Modern History, Got Sick, and Will
(Eventually) Feel Better. This book is about how inequality is
good because, well, it generates more millionaires.

Robert F Dalzell Jr: The Good Rich and What They Cost
Us (2013, Yale University Press): The pictures on the
cover depict George Washington, Oprah Winfrey, and two guys in
the middle -- I gather one is John D. Rockefeller, who despite
the enormous foundation that still bears his name was never
much regarded as "good," for the public at least. Probes the
contradiction between a public committed to democracy and one
that seems to celebrate the rich.

John Demos: The Heathen School: A Story of Hope and
Betrayal in the Age of the Early Republic (2014, Knopf):
A study in racism, really, as Demos examines a school set up by
New England evangelists for "heathens" from around the globe --
Henry Obookiah, from Hawaii, was a famous student here -- and
how the Connecticut community reacted to that school.

Barbara Ehrenreich: Living With a Wild God: A Nonbeliever's
Search for the Truth About Everything (2014, Grand Central):
A memoir of sorts, about the search for truth or knowledge or
understanding. One of the few people I'd read anything by.

Graham Farmelo: Churchill's Bomb: How the United States
Overtook Britain in the First Nuclear Arms Race (2013, Basic
Books): One can argue that early in WWII Britain had the best shot at
inventing the atomic bomb, and that Churchill for one reason or another
ceded that lead to the US -- that seems to be the thrust here, and it
would probably be interesting to find out what Churchill did and did
not understand about the project, although in the end it's hard to see
it mattering much. The British Empire could hardly stand on its own
let alone pay for the mother country's disastrous wars, so it was no
surprise that Britain emerged from the war reduced to America's loyal
(and dependent) sidekick -- something else Churchill may or may not
have understood, but ultimately couldn't do anything about.

Carlotta Gall: The Wrong Enemy: America in Afghanistan
2001-2014 (2014, Houghton Mifflin): Longtime war reporter
argues that the US war in Afghanistan failed because the "real enemy"
wasn't the Taliban. It was Pakistan. That's not exactly news, but it
opens up more questions than it answers, and more importantly it
leaves unexamined America's contribution to its own failure.

Timothy F Geithner: Stress Test: Reflections on Financial
Crises (2014, Crown): Obama's Secretary of the Treasury
was already deeply involved in the struggle to save the big banks
as head of the New York Fed in 2008. I doubt he has much to say
about other financial crises, but for the one he experienced first
hand he's happy to take credit for saving not only the banks but
the bankers who ran them into the ground. As for the rest of the
economy, well, that's more complicated, and as far as I can tell
not something Geithner reflects on much, or even cares about.

Malcolm Gladwell: David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits,
and the Art of Battling Giants (2013, Little Brown): Stories
showing how underdogs can leverage their weakness to get ahead, or
something like that. I don't have a strong opinion on him one way
or the other: he has a knack for making trivial points, and a great
fondness of success even when it's pretty superficial, but sometimes
he runs across something interesting or important and he's rarely
stupid or inelegant about it.

Anand Gopal: No Good Men Among the Living: America, the
Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes (2014, Metropolitan):
Focuses on three examples (a Taliban commander, a member of the
US-backed government, and a village housewife), showing through
each how the occupying Americans are viewed in Afghanistan, and
therefore the limits of what they can hope to do.

Glenn Greenwald: No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA,
and the US Surveillance State (2014, Metropolitan Books):
A lawyer, Greenwald reacted to the Patriot Act by becoming a blogger
focused on how the security state is encroaching on civil liberties --
a transformation he explained in his book How Would a Patriot Act?
Since then he's found more and more to worry about, most dramatically
when Snowden passed him leaked info about NSA spying.

David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the End of
Capitalism (2014, Oxford University Press): English Marxist,
has been picking at the scab of capitalism for many years, churning
out books like Limits to Capital (2007), A Short History
of Neoliberalism (2007), and The Enigma of Capital and the
Crises of Capitalism (2010) -- I read the latter and found it
tedious but deeply insightful. No surprise that he finds capitalism
rife with contradictions -- many are obvious even casually -- or
that they periodically crack up but that "end" has proven elusive.

Ann Jones: They Were Soldiers: How the Wounded Return From
America's Wars: The Untold Story (paperback, 2014, Haymarket
Books): Former NGO worker, wrote Winter in Kabul: Life Without
Peace in Afghanistan about what she saw in Afghanistan in 2002,
and two more books following the casualties: War Is Not Over When
It's Over: Women and the Unseen Consequences of Conflict, and
now this short book on maimed US soldiers -- the real VA scandal.

Robert D Kaplan: Asia's Cauldron: The South China Sea and
the End of a Stable Pacific (2014, Random House): Former
travel writer to uncomfortable backwaters, has proven to be useful
enough to the US security state he got appointed to the Defense
Policy Board, where he's probably regarded as a deep thinker. No
doubt he'd like nothing better than to stir up a Cold War with
China, giving the Pentagon cover for buying up another generation
of war toys.

Harvey J Kaye: The Fight for the Four Freedoms: What Made
FDR and the Greatest Generation Truly Great (2014, Simon &
Schuster): The Four Freedoms -- "Franklin Roosevelt's vision of a
truly just and fair America" -- was war propaganda and thus easily
forgotten once FDR died and the war against Germany and Japan was
concluded. They are, however, something we can and should aspire to
today, especially given the beating at least two freedoms (from want
and from fear) have taken from the right in recent decades. Kaye
previously wrote Thomas Paine and the Promise of America
(2005, Hill and Wang).

Lane Kenworthy: Social Democratic America (2014,
Oxford University Press): Argues that the US has been progressing
slowly toward the social democracy common in most wealthy nations,
but isn't that a stretch given how hard it is to talk about such
things in their customary terms? So I expect this is longer on
prescription than description, but mapping popular programs like
Social Security and Medicare into the social democratic matrix
is a step toward realizing what we're missing.

Benjamin Kunkel: Utopia or Bust: A Guide to the Present
Crisis (paperback, 2014, Verso): Short "crash course" in
the latest Marxist/Leftist thinking on the economy -- names dropped
include Zizek, Harvey, Graeber, Jameson. Previously wrote the novel
Indecision.

Costas Lapavitsas: Profiting Without Producing: How Finance
Exploits Us All (paperback, 2014, Verso): British economist,
previous book focused on Eurozone issues, sees "financialization" as
the root of most of our current evils. There can be little doubt that
most of the profits capitalism produces these days go to the financial
sector, and it would be interesting to understand why.

Nathan Lean: The Islamophobia Industry: How the Right
Manufactures Fear of Muslims (paperback, 2012, Pluto Press):
One of many (mostly but not all critical) books on the fear of and
hatred against Muslims that has been cultivated in the US and Europe
recently, concurrent with the US War on Terror and the termination
of Israel's "peace process." Lean sees a right-wing conspiracy as
responsible, with the Israel lobby at least complicit. I suspect
it's uglier and dumber than that, in part because the hatred has
overshot US neo-imperial goals, turning right-wingers anti-war (as
we saw with Syria). Other recent books (no idea if they're any good
or not): Chris Allen: Islamophobia (paperback, 2010, Ashgate);
Carl W Ernst, ed: Islamophobia in America: The Anatomy of
Intolerance (paperback, 2013, Palgrave Macmillan); John L
Esposito/Ibraham Kalin, eds: Islamophobia: The Challenge of
Pluralism in the 21st Century (paperback, 2011, Oxford University
Press); Peter Gottschalk/Gabriel Greenberg: Islamophobia: Making
Muslims the Enemy (2007, Rowman & Littlefield); Deepa Kumar:
Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire (paperback, 2012,
Haymarket Books); Stephen Sheehi: Islamophobia: The Ideological
Campaign Against Muslims (paperback, 2011, Clarity Press); John
R Bowen: Blaming Islam (2012, MIT Press); Walid Shoebat/Ben
Barrack: The Case FOR Islamophobia: Jihad by the Word; America's
Final Warning (2013, Top Executive Media). I could also mention:
Jack Shaheen: Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies a People
(2nd ed, paperback, 2009, Olive Branch Press); and Martha C Nussbaum:
The New Religious Intollerance: Overcoming the Politics of Fear in
an Anxious Age (2012, Belknap Press).

Michael Lewis: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt
(2014, WW Norton): A book on high-frequency trading, entertaining
and informative no doubt, with something of a moral centre even
though the journalist is inordinately fond of rich people.

Isaac Martin: Rich People's Movements: Grassroots Campaigns
to Untax the One Percent (2013, Oxford University Press):
That would be the Tea Party, the best irate mob money can buy,
which gave an air of faux populism to some of the most extremely
reactionary ideas of the last few decades, struggling above all
against the idea that the government should serve the people who
elected it. Title here reminds one of the Frances Fox Piven/Richard
A Cloward classic, Poor People's Movements: Why They Succeed,
How They Fail (1977; paperback, 1978, Vintage Books).

Mariana Mazzucato: The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking
Public vs. Private Sector Myths (paperback, 2013, Anthem):
Two myths seem especially prevalent today: that public investment
only comes at the expense of private investment, and that that's
a bad thing. I can think of others, but that's not necessarily the
point here: she seems to be focusing on technology and business
subsidies governments give out that are ultimately snapped up by
private sector investors -- an obvious case in point is support
of "green energy" sectors like wind and solar (efforts so hated
by the oil-bound Kochs).

Suzanne Mettler: Degrees of Inequality: How the Politics
of Higher Education Sabotaged the American Dream (2014,
Basic Books): Until the 1970s public support of higher education
tended to make American society and economy more equitable, but
that has since changed. Personally, I think education has long
been overrated, especially as a panacea, but lately it's higher
costs and mountains of debt have turned into a cruel trap. The
real roots of inequality are political, and the very suggestion
that you can compensate for that by raising an educated caste
is itself part of the problem -- maybe even one that prefigured
the political shift?

Ian Morris: War: What's It Good For? (2014, Farrar Straus
and Giroux): Edwin Starr could answer that in far less than these 512
pages: "absolutely nothing." Morris likes to jump all over the place, as
in his previous Why the West Rules -- For Now: The Patterns of History,
and What They Reveal About the Future, but his bottom line seems to
be "war made the state, and the state made peace." I'm tempted to add:
but only after making war unbearable, and even now way too many people
haven't learned the lesson.

Ralph Nader: Unstoppable: The Emerging Left-Right Alliance to
Dismantle the Corporate State (2014, Nation Books): Given how
extensively the "grass roots" right has been underwritten by the same
corporations Nader decries, I have to question the wisdom of any such
"alliance" -- even when left and right may agree on a point, such as
the TARP bailout slush fund, all the two sides can conceivably do is
to block something particularly foul. What they can't do is to create
something that would work fairly, because the right is fundamentally
set on destruction of the public sphere. Still, if obstruction is the
sole goal -- as in keeping Obama from bombing Syria, or allowing the
NSA to spy on all Americans -- sure, there's some potential there.

Richard Overy: The Bombers and the Bombed: Allied Air War
Over Europe 1940-1945 (2014, Viking): Attempts to broaden
our understanding of the air war over Europe by including the
experiences of the bombed, especially in horrific fire storms
like Hamburg and Dresden. The US edition omits a complementary
survey of the German bombing of England, some 300 pages from the
UK edition (The Bombing War: Europe 1939-1945).

Nomi Prins: All the President's Bankers (2014,
Nation Books): Wrote one of the better books on the finance meltdown
(It Takes a Pillage: Behind the Bailouts, Bonuses, and Backroom
Deals from Washington to Wall Street). This seems to go deeper
into the historic relationship between bankers and politics, as if
JP Morgan had anything to do with our current mess. Of course, he
probably did, and Andrew Mellon and David Rockefeller and Walter
Wriston too.

David Reynolds: The Long Shadow: The Legacies of the Great
War in the Twentieth Century (2014, WW Norton): One hundred
years after the Great War (as it was known at the time, WWI as it was
renamed, or the opening of the "30-years war of the 20th century" (as
Arno Mayer reconceived it), we're suddenly seeing an avalanche of
books on the subject, with much arguing over how it all started, and
much detailing of the exceptional gore (WWII was much worse on
civilians, but rarely matched the earlier war for pitched battles --
Stalingrad was an exception, but still couldn't match Marne). This
book at least tries to make good use of the intervening century. I've
noted a fair number of these books separately (Christopher Clark,
Geoffrey Wawro), but also: Tim Butcher: The Trigger: Hunting the
Assassin Who Brought the World to War; Prit Butlar: Collision
of Empires: The War on the Eastern Front in 1914 (Osprey); Charles
Emmerson: 1913: In Search of the World Before the Great War
(2013, Public Affairs); Peter Hart: The Great War: A Combat History
of the First World War (2013, Oxford University Press); Max
Hastings: Catastrophe 1914: Europe Goes to War (2013,
Knopf); Paul Jankowski: Verdun: The Longest Battle of the Great
War (Oxford University Press); Philip Jenkins: The Great and
Holy War: How World War I Became a Religious Crusade; Nick Lloyd:
Hundred Days: The Campaign That Ended World War I (Basic
Books); Margaret MacMillan: The War That Ended Peace: The Road to
1914 (2013, Random House); Gordon Martel: The Month that
Changed the World: July 1914 (7/1, Oxford University Press); Shawn
McMeekin: July 1914: Countdown to War (2013, Basic Books);
William Mulligan: The Great War for Peace (Yale University
Press); Michael Neiberg: The Military Atlas of World War I
(Chartwell); TG Otte: July Crisis: The World's Descent into War,
Summer 1914 (Cambridge University Press); William Philpott: War
of Attrition: Fighting the First World War (Overlook); Ian Senior:
Invasion 1914: The Schelieffen Plan to the Battle of the Marne
(8/19, Osprey); Gary Sheffield: Morale and Command: The British
Army on the Western Front (Pen and Sword); David Stone: The
Kaiser's Army: The German Army in World War I (7/24, Conway);
Kristian Coates Ulrichsen: The First World War in the Middle
East (7/25, Hurst); Alexander Watson: Ring of Steel:
Germany and Austria-Hungary in World War I (10/7, Basic Books).

Amanda Ripley: The Smartest Kids in the World: And How They
Got That Way (2013, Simon & Schuster): Like TR Reid in
The Healing of America: A Global Quest for Better, Cheaper, and
Fairer Health Care, Ripley travels around the world searching
out what seems to work and offering it as an alternative to what
doesn't work in the US: an easy approach that avoids theory but also
misses many of the pitfalls theory introduces. I doubt however that
the process will work as well, because it's easier to define what a
good health care system is -- one where fewer people get sick and
stuck in that system -- than what would make for a good education
system: indeed, much of the "theory" out there is really a dispute
over what education should do (e.g., make people smarter vs. train
people better to fill assigned slots).

Jake Rosenfeld: What Unions No Long Do (2014, Harvard
University Press): Have much political clout for one thing, which is
a problem given how much our system depends on countervaling powers
to keep from going insane in favor of one interest group -- mainly
business. But also they don't seem to care as much about the broader
groups of people who aren't unionized, effectively leaving them without
political representation. (Arguably, American unions have always been
weak there, but still.)

Daniel Schulman: Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became
America's Most Powerful and Private Dynasty (2014, Grand Central):
Much in the news recently for their efforts to destroy democracy in the
US (err, to safeguard the freedom of second-generation oil billionaires),
this gives you some background on who they are, where they and all their
money came from, and how they've evolved from John Birch Society paranoids
to Tea Party astroturfers.

Rebecca Solnit: Men Explain Things to Me (paperback,
2014, Haymarket Books): Short (100 pp) collection of essays, the
title one about male mistakes in talking to women, and others about
war, Virginia Woolf, and the IMF.

Joshua Steckel/Beth Zasloff: Hold Fast to Dreams: A College
Guidance Counselor, His Students, and the Vision of a Life Beyond
Poverty (2014, New Press): The author left his job at a ritzy
private school to try to guide poor kids into college, and illustrates
that task with profiles of ten students, the innumerable problems
they faced, and some measure of success, sometimes.

Matt Taibbi: The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of
the Wealth Gap (2014, Spiegel & Grau): Defines "the
divide" as: "the seam in American life where our two most troubling
trends -- growing wealth inequality and mass incarceration -- come
together . . . what allows massively destructive fraud by the
hyperwealthy to go unpunished, while turning poverty itself into
a crime." So this expands upon his previous fraud-focused book,
Griftopia: Bubble Machines, Vampire Squids, and the Long Con
That Is Breaking America (2010), broadening the context, and
probably looks back to his earlier work on politics.

Elizabeth Warren: A Fighting Chance (2014, Metropolitan):
I don't put much stock on books by politicians, but before she ran for
office she co-write The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Parents
Are Going Broke (2004), a timely issue if ever there was one. This
one is more of a memoir, but the path from where she came from to where
she is now feels authentic, and her grip on how policy affects ordinary
people is smart and shrewd.

Geoffrey Wawro: A Mad Catastrophe: The Outbreak of World
War I and the Collapse of the Habsburg Empire (2014, Basic
Books): Focuses on Austria-Hungary, which gambled on its ability
to seize Serbia and lost everything in the first world war -- a
failure he finds rooted in the previous decline of the empire.

John F Weeks: Economics of the 1%: How Mainstream Economics
Serves the Rich, Obscures Reality and Distorts Policy
(paperback, 2014, Anthem): Uh, sure. Even if economics somehow
managed to only study the actual workings of the economy it would
be most useful to the rich for uncovering opportunities to profit,
but in fact most economists not only study capitalism but are in
thrall to it and more than willing to propagandize on behalf of
the rich, even making arguments that contradict well known maxims.
Weeks is far from the first author to notice this.

Some books previously mentioned that have since come out in
paperback. Normally I'd write a bit on each, but I've had trouble
researching this section, and it turns out that my draft file is
mostly stubs (some rather old), so for this time (at least) I
figure I should just flush it:

Donald L Bartlett/James B Steele: The Betrayal of the
American Dream (2012; paperback, 2013, Public Affairs):

Louisa Thomas: Conscience: Two Soldiers, Two Pacifists,
One Family -- a Test of Will and Faith in World War I
(2011; paperback, 2012, Penguin):

Nick Turse: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American
War in Vietnam (paperback, 2013, Picador):

Patrick Tyler: Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the
Military Elite Who Run the Country -- and Why They Can't Make
Peace (2012; paperback, 2013, Farrar Straus and Giroux):

Maybe with a fresh start I'll write more next time. Usually there's
an implied recommendation in the paperback listings -- I don't go out
and look to see if books I have no interest in have been reprinted --
but the only ones above I have read are: Louisa Thomas' fine book on
her ancestors (most famously Norman Thomas); and three books on Israel
(Rashid Khalidi, Shlomo Sand, and Patrick Tyler). I do, however, have
Corey Robin, Christia Freedland, and Breaking the Silence on
the shelf and mean to get to them sooner or later. Several others are
things I'd like to read if I can find the time.

Saturday, June 28. 2014

B&N pushes Sons of Wichita on their website, so I expected
to find it on sale at their store, but in Wichita they don't even stock
it.

The book is
Daniel Schulman: Sons of Wichita: How the Koch Brothers Became America's
Most Powerful and Private Dynasty. B&N has it on sale for 35%
off -- a much better deal than Amazon offers (looks like the publisher
is one of those Amazon's been trying to shake down). B&N's website
lists is as the 7th best selling book in politics & current events,
just ahead of Elizabeth Warren's A Fighting Chance and Glenn
Greenwald's No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US
Surveillance State. Wichita is the home turf of the Koch family
and their company, probably the second (or third) largest employer in
town, so you'd think their would be more than average interest in the
book here -- certainly not zero. So you don't have to be paranoid to
wonder whether someone's arm's been twisted a bit.

I've seen a couple excerpts from Schulman's book in Mother Jones,
and they strike me as basically fair:

I've also seen a piece (don't have link) where Schulman speculates that
the Koch's libertarianism could help steer the Republicans back to more
moderate positions on "culture war" issues. I've never seen any evidence
of this. Presumably, for instance, as libertarians the Kochs support
abortion rights, but no enough to break with any Republican who comes
close to them on money issues. And they should be against drug prohibition
and every aspect of America's military presence in Asia and Africa, but
those issues never seem to factor into their political patronage.

Wednesday, April 2. 2014

Another batch of new book notes. Last one came out on
February 11 and cleared out a backlog of 52 books -- more than
my usual 40 limit. I imagine I can do these posts monthly or so,
and indeed with my research unfinished, a little less than two
months has filled this post (40 titles) and left me with 33 in the
queue. Notably, that queue includes a few books that are either
just out (Michael Lewis: Flash Boys: A Wall Street Revolt)
or forthcoming (David Harvey: Seventeen Contradictions and the
End of Capitalism [April 4]; Nomi Prins: All the President's
Bankers [April 8]; Matt Taibbi: The Divide: American Injustice
in the Age of the Wealth Gap [April 8]; Glenn Greenwald: No
Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the US Surveillance
State [May 13]). Given the importance of those books, another
column should be due soon.

Sasha Abramsky: The American Way of Poverty: How the Other
Half Still Lives (2013, Nation Books): Fifty years after
Michael Harrington's The Other America, we still live in a
land of poverty and want -- even more so now than then, as the
trendline is getting worse and the political will to do something
about it has vanished. Mixed views on this book suggest that jumping
between anecdotal description and broadside prescription doesn't
reall handle either end, but the problem is real enough.

Bill Bryson: One Summer: America, 1927 (2013,
Doubleday): Pick a year, any year. Bryson picked the one when
Lindbergh flew solo across the Atlantic, the Mississippi flooded,
and Babe Ruth hit 60 home runs, among other things (e.g., "the
four most powerful central bankers on earth met in secret session
on a Long Island estate and made a fateful decision that virtually
guaranteed a future crash and depression"). Good chance Bryson
could turn any year into something vastly entertaining and deeply
informative.

Ian Buruma: Year Zero: A History of 1945 (2013,
Penguin Press): Every year things change a little, but an astonishing
number of big things changed in 1945: the world war ended with Japan
and Germany unconditionally defeated, the holocaust and the atom bomb
were revealed, European colonial control over Europe and Asia had been
undermined (but it would take some years to fully fracture), the map
of Eastern Europe was quickly redrawn, various revolutions erupted,
economies were in ruins (except for the US, which was never stronger),
millions of people had been displaced, the "cold war" was quickly
brewing (although at the same time the UN was forming). Much to
write about, including the simultaneity of all that change.

David Brion Davis: The Problem of Slavery in the Age of
Emancipation (2014, Knopf): The author's third The
Problem of Slavery book, the trilogy spread out over 45 years --
hard to overstate how important the first volume was in changing
our view of slavery and racism. This picks up the story around
1820, focusing on the UK and US with a side glance at Haiti.

Jared Diamond: The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From
Traditional Societies? (2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin): His
two previous books -- Guns, Germ and Steel: The Fates of Human
Societies (1997), and Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail
or Succeed (2004) -- were high concept comparative mega-histories,
sweeping and thought-provoking. Here he returns to his anthropology
roots, writing about primitive societies, no doubt including a lot of
New Guinea, since that's his specialty. Still, big questions abide:
the transition to agriculture 11,000 years ago was not without its
down sides, and those problems percolate up to the present.

William Easterly: The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators,
and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor (2014, Basic Books): Author
writes on development economics -- e.g., The White Man's Burden: Why
the West's Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little
Good -- so he could be taken as one of the experts he disparages.
But he cuts against the grain, and has no shortage of examples of ideas
that haven't worked. Also, his argument for "respect of the individual
rights of people in developing countries" seems right, as is his point
that "unchecked state power is the problem and not the solution" (here
we're talking about the predatory effect of dictators, not the fevers
of the tea party).

Yuval Elizur/Lawrence Malkin: The War Within: Israel's
Ultra-Orthodox (2013; paperback, 2014, Overlook): On the
special roles and privileges of the ultra-orthodox in Israel, an
often sore point for secular Jews in Israel, and I suspect one of
the forces that relentlessly pushes Israel to the right, further
estranging it from the rest of the world.

Lee Fang: The Machine: A Field Guide to the Resurgent Right
(2013, New Press): The "vast right-wing conspiracy" (in Hillary Clinton's
apt phrase) has been carefully built up since the 1970s, and swung into
full gear in 2009 to disrupt and undermine newly elected president Obama
and the Democrats' "fillibuster-proof" congressional majority, and they
did a remarkable job of it. This book goes into how they did it, how
they manufactured a viable critique and enough noise to pose as grass
roots momentum.

Caroline B Glick: The Israeli Solution: A One-State Plan
for Peace in the Middle East (2014, Crown Forum): Not a
single state in Israel/Palestine where everyone lives with equal
rights under equitable laws, though Glick dresses up Jewish
dominance in various guises, including her claim that census
data "wildly exaggerated the numbers of Palestinians living in
the West Bank and Gaza." So this does start to shift away from
the "two-state solution" that gets so much lip service but no
actual support from liberal Zionists, including virtually all
American politicians.

Frances Goldin/Debby Smith/Michael Steven Smith, eds: Living
in a Socialist USA (paperback, 2014, Harper Perennial): A mixed
bag of essays, none afraid of the "S-word" but while some take the
traditional tack and blame capitalism (e.g., Paul Street's "Capitalism:
The Real Enemy") and some try to imagine post-capitalist (Rick Wolff)
or ecosocialist (Joel Kovel) economic forms, others are likely more
reformist, either intent on mitigating excesses of capitalism or using
government to make amends. A big part of the reason socialism has come
to be more respected of late is that the right uses the scare word so
loosely, it now covers all sorts of modest reforms few old leftists
would even recognize.

Daniel Gordis: Menachem Begin: The Battle for Israel's Soul
(2014, Schocken): Born in Poland, in his youth joined the fascist Betar
movement, emigrating to Palestine in the 1940s where he quickly rose to
head the Irgun, an ultra-right-wing paramilitary organization responsible
for many of the worst atrocities of Israel's "War for Independence." Once
the Irgun was integrated into the IDF, he went into politics, establishing
himself as an extreme right-wing demagogue until he was suddenly invited
("without portfolio") into the "unity government" which launched Israel's
expansionist 1967 war. A decade later he became Israel's first Likud Prime
Minister, consolidating and furthering the nation's drift into militarism.
He reluctantly signed a peace agreement which returned the Sinai to Egypt,
allowing reopening of the Suez Canal, then plotted to destroy the PLO
once and for all by invading Lebanon -- the act which, for me at least,
destroyed the last shred of credibility that Israel possessed. This looks
to be a sympathetic biography, which doesn't mean you'll come away liking
the little monster.

Gershom Gorenberg: The Unmaking of Israel (2011;
paperback, 2012, Harper Perennial): I read this a few years ago
and was surprised I hadn't mentioned it here before. You can think
of this as a kinder, gentler version of (not alternative to) Max
Blumenthal's Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel.
Both deal with the rot at the heart of a nation dedicated to the
domination of one group over all others. The shadings differ a
bit, with Gorenberg more concerned with the established religion,
but religion wouldn't be so critical if it weren't needed to justify
the occupation. Gorenberg previously wrote The Accidental Empire:
Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977, which
similarly soft-pedaled the origins of the settler movement while
at least acknowledging the facts.

Greg Grandin: The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and
Deception in the New World (2014, Metropolitan Books): One
story here concerns New Englanders establishing colonial outposts in
the south Pacific in the early 19th century, killing seals and selling
them in China. Not sure what else you get here, but Herman Melville
seems to be one prism into looking at early post-independence America,
an "age of freedom" but also an "age of slavery."

Husain Haqqani: Magnificent Delusions: Pakistan, the United
States, and an Epic History of Misunderstanding (2013, Public
Affairs): Of course, I doubt that the US could have done anything to
make a success out of the 2001 Afghanistan intervention -- I think
they sealed their fate in 1979 when they decided it would be such fun
to arm religious fanatics to kill Russians -- but high on the Bush
administration's list of tactical errors was their utter inability to
come to a mutual understanding with Pakistan. (Nor did Obama do any
better when he gave that pompous ass Richard Holbrooke the assignment.)
Haqqani has been a Pakistani diplomat and is currently a professor at
Boston U, so he's likely to be intimately acquainted with the sort of
incomprehensible nonsense that makes for such epic misunderstandings.

Jacqueline Jones: A Dreadful Deceit: The Myth of Race From
the Colonial Era to Obama's America (2013, Basic Books):
Rather than write a sketch history of racism in America, Jones takes
six individuals including a slave in colonial Maryland and an auto
worker in recent Detroit, real people to stand the various myths of
race and the realities of power against.

John B Judis: Genesis: Truman, American Jews, and the Origins
of the Arab/Israeli Conflict (2014, Farrar Straus and Giroux):
Looks specifically at the years 1945-49, when the US had conquered the
Axis powers and was starting to establish itself as a global hegemon,
probing deep into why Truman sided with Israel and what that meant for
the evolution of the Arab/Israeli conflict. Alison Weir: Against Our
Better Judgment: The Hidden History of How the United States Was Used
to Create Israel (paperback, 2014, CreateSpace) covers the same
ground, much more briefly. I've been reading Judis and am impressed
with his depth and balance.

Michael B Katz: The Undeserving Poor: America's Enduring
Confrontation With Poverty (1989; updated and revised,
paperback, 2013, Oxford University Press): One effective way to
keep poor people poor is to blame their poverty on their supposed
shortcomings -- perhaps the title should be The Deserving Poor,
since that's the thrust of interests which seek to deflect blame for
impoverishment.

Stephen Kinzer: The Brothers: John Foster Dulles, Allen
Dulles, and Their Secret World War (2013, Times Books): A
biography of two of the major architects of the Cold War, all the
more potent when they controlled both the official (State Dept.)
and clandestine (CIA) policy-making agencies, and weren't the least
averse to going behind the back of the president who appointed them.
Kinzer approached this story when he wrote one of the better accounts
of the CIA coup against Iran in 1953 (All the Shah's Men: An
American Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror), then went
on to take a longer look at American mischief (Overthrow: America's
Century of Regime Change From Hawaii to Iraq).

Elizabeth Kolbert: The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
(2014, Henry Holt): Five massive waves of extinctions have occurred since
the Cambrian period when most modern phyla came into existence, with each
defining boundaries between geological ages, something we can discern with
the perspective of millions of years. Kolbert is suggesting that the sheer
quantity of species extinctions that have occurred in recent years is well
on its way to adding up to a sixth major extinction event, and she's
traveling around the world gathering and checking out evidence. Not the
first book on this subject -- cf. Richard E Leakey: The Sixth Extinction:
Patterns of Life and the Future of Humankind (paperback, 1996, Anchor);
Terry Glavin, The Sixth Extinction: Journeys Among the Lost and Left
Behind (2007, Thomas Dunne); and for that matter a couple classics:
David Quammen: The Song of the Dodo: Island Biography in an Age of
Extinction (paperback, 1997, Scribner); and Paul S Martin/Herbert
Edgar Wright, eds: Pleistocene Extinctions: The Search for a Cause
(1967, Yale University Press) -- but likely a succinct, thought-provoking
summary.

David Landau: Arik: The Life of Ariel Sharon (2014,
Knopf): Having just referred to Begin as Israel's "little monster,"
it's no contest who the corresponding "big monster" was. Sharon could
never be described as Begin's henchman: Begin bears responsibility for
the Lebanon war, and more importantly for letting Sharon run it, but none
for the actual details of how Sharon ran the war. Sharon had been a
great favorite of Ben Gurion's and Dayan's, but what they loved him
for wasn't doing what they wanted but invariably going much farther: he not
only destroyed things, he did so at levels and degrees his "superiors"
couldn't dream of asking for. His Lebanon War was like that, leading
to the massacre of thousands of Palestinians, and his suppression of
the second Intifada was like that. Still, it is important to realize
that Sharon wasn't insane (unlike, say, Begin, whose tortured mind
seemed to be stuck constantly replaying the Holocaust). He could make
a tactical retreat when he needed to regroup, and on some level he
seemed to be completely cynical about politics and everything else --
the real reason he was capable of such brutality was that he knew he
would be adored for it, although it also helped that he was utterly
indifferent to what anyone else thought or care about. And that he
was so successful for so long ultimately says much more about his
country than it does him. Reviewers say this is "scrupulously fair,"
which is to say it's mostly warts because that's what his supporters
admired so much about him. Anything less would be a disservice.

Jill Lepore: Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane
Franklin (2013, Knopf): Benjamin Franklin's sister, who
unlike Shakespeare's sister was a real person we actually know a
good deal about, not that anyone bothered to focus much on her
before. Lepore started as a notable historian of 18th century
America, but then developed a knack for semi-popular nonfiction
pieces in the New Yorker and learned to bounce masterfully
between past and present, as in The Whites of Their Eyes: The
Tea Party's Revolution and the Battle Over American History.

Antony Lerman: The Making and Unmaking of a Zionist: A
Personal and Political Journey (2012, Pluto Press): British
Jew, in 1960s worked on a kibbutz and served in the IDF, later
returning to England, working in think tanks, eventually turning
into a critic of current Israeli policies.

Ian Haney López: Dog Whistle Politics: How Coded Racial
Appeals Have Reinvented Racism and Wrecked the Middle Class
(2014, Oxford University Press): For obvious examples, recall the
presidential campaigns of Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan, and George
Bush (the "Willie Horton" one, not that the other was much better),
then think of what else those elections delivered. López previously
wrote White by Law: The Legal Construction of Race.

Bill McKibben: Oil and Honey: The Education of an Unlikely
Activist (2013, Times Books): Author of one of the early
books on global warming -- The End of Nature (1989) -- and
many other books, writes about how he was increasingly drawn into
political action, including leading protests against the Keystone
XL pipeline. One step along the way was his activist manual: Fight
Global Warming Now: The Handbook for Taking Action in Your Community
(paperback, 2007, St. Martin's Griffin)

Betsy Medsger: The Burglary: The Discovery of J. Edgar Hoover's
Secret FBI (2014, Knopf): The inside story of a small group of
people who broke into an FBI office in Media, PA, and collected and
leaked secret files about FBI operations aimed at harrassing the civil
rights and antiwar movements. Hoover had used his extraordinary power
base to blackmail presidents as well as to further his reactionary
political goals, a secret program that couldn't survive exposure --
so this burglary was the beginning of the end of his reputation and
reign of terror.

John Nichols/Robert W McChesney: Dollarocracy: How the Money
and Media Election Complex Is Destroying America (2013,
Nation Books): $10 billion spent on the last election, and what
do we have to show for it? Politicians of two parties beholden
to money. That money distorts politics is one of the few things
virtually everyone agrees on, yet it never emerges as a reform
issue because the candidates themselves are selected precisely
for their ability to raise money.

William Nordhaus: The Climate Casino: Risk, Uncertainty, and
Economics for a Warming World (2013, Yale University Press):
Economist, has his name added to recent editions of Paul Samuelson's
legendary economics textbook (at least since 1985), and previously
weighed in on the economics of global warming in 2008: A Question
of Balance: Weighing the Options on Global Warming Policies; also
Warming the World: Economic Models of Global Warming (2003),
and Managing the Global Commons: The Economics of Climate Change
(1994). A moderate and sensible guide to the science plus a lot of
ideas on modeling risks and costs -- should be an important book.

Ilan Pappé: The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and
Knowledge (2014, Verso): A history of Zionism as ideology,
how its fundamental ideas infuse Israeli culture, especially in
institutions like the school system and reinforced through the
media. Focuses on the framing of the 1948 "War for Independence"
in its initial "official" narrative and later post-Zionist and
Neo-Zionist incarnations.

Thomas Piketty: Capital in the Twenty-First Century
(2014, Belknap Press): Presumes not to update Marx but to dance on
his grave, celebrating not only increasing inequality but the fact
that wealth inequality is increasingly inherited -- with the risk
that workers may once again feel that they have nothing to lose in
revolution except their shackles. "The main driver of inequality --
the tendency of returns on capital to exceed the rate of economic
growth -- today threatens to generate extreme inequalities that stir
discontent and undermine democratic values." Meanwhile, most Marxists
will tell you that those returns are fraudulently jacked up, so not
even more inequality can keep the machine running. Nonetheless, what
happens at the bottom is all too real. Piketty's future is what he
calls "patrimonial capitalism" -- pretty much the same sort of
aristocracy the bourgeois revolutions struggled to overturn.

Kenneth Pollack: Unthinkable: Iran, the Bomb, and American
Strategy (2013, Simon & Schuster): Ex-CIA analyst, wrote
an influential book advocating war with Iraq, then turned around and
became a dove rather than a "real man" on Iran in his book The
Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and America. Evidently,
he still feels we need his advice -- possibly because it wasn't taken
last time, although diplomatic breakthroughs since this was printed
have rendered much of the tough posturing he felt necessary to retain
his credibility has suddenly become irrelevant.

Jonathan Porritt: The World We Made: Alex McKay's Story
From 2050 (paperback, 2013, Phaidon Press): An expert on
sustainable development strategies jumps ahead to 2050 to look
back on how those strategies saved the world, through the eyes
of a 50-year-old fictional Alex McKay, recalling not only what
happened but how such change came about -- a mix of disasters
and activism. Porritt previously wrote Capitalism as if the
World Matters (paperback, 2007, Routledge), which gives
business a positive role to play even if they don't seem up to
it.

Gareth Porter: Manufactured Crisis: The Untold Story of the
Iran Nuclear Scare (paperback, 2014, Just World Books): One
of the few journalists to see through Israel's relentless propaganda
about Iran's "nuclear program" in what should be a very important
book. Porter's Perils of Dominance: Imbalance of Power and the
Road to War in Vietnam was an eye-opener in showing how US
failure in Vietnam was rooted in arrogance.

Diane Ravitch: Reign of Error: The Hoax of the Privatization
Movement and the Danger to America's Public Schools (2013,
Knopf): Follow up to The Death and Life of the Great American
School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education
(2010). Back in the late 1960s, after I dropped out of high school,
I read a ton of books on education, of which the best was Charles
Weingartner/Neal Postman: Teaching as a Subversive Activity,
followed by Paul Goodman: Compulsory Mis-Education/The Community
of Scholars. Those at least were books that recognized problems
that I actually saw and attempted to overcome them. So my reaction
here is that Ravitch is probably right as far as she goes, but, my
oh my, has the level of discussion deteriorated. The last sensible
thing I've read on education was Jane Jacobs: Dark Ages Ahead,
and I don't see any indication that Jacobs is wrong. But I may be
being too pessimistic, because the actual teachers and students I
have known lately seem smarter and more dedicated than the ones I
encountered back in the day. Unfortunately, I don't think they're
getting those traits from school.

Barnett R Rubin: Afghanistan From the Cold War Through the
War on Terror (2013, Oxford University Press): For many years
one of the most insightful experts on Afghanistan, Rubin disappeared
from public discourse when he signed on as an advisor to Richard
Holbrooke and stayed on after Holbrooke died. His insider status --
he was also involved in the Bonn talks in 2001 and various other UN
efforts -- no doubt informs this book, and probably compromises it
as well. Leslie Gelb: "If published a decade ago, the insights in
Barney Rubin's book could have prevented the Americanization of the
war in Afghanistan." How lucky for Obama then to have co-opted the
person he most needed as a critic?

Orville Schell/John Delury: Wealth and Power: China's
Long March to the Twenty-first Century (2013, Random
House): Goes back as far as the 19th century Opium Wars to get
a handle on the intellectual threads that transformed China
from peasant communism to a cutting-edge industrial powerhouse.
Schell is one of the best-known historians of China.

Ari Shavit: My Promised Land: The Triumph and Tragedy of
Israel (2013, Spiegel & Grau): A "feel good" book about
Israel for a time when one has to wonder, but the heroic personal
stories establish an air of such exalted wonderfulness that one can
admit to historical atrocities like the forced exile of the entire
Arab population of Lydda and then write it off by declaring it as
one of the necessary founding blocks of today's wonderful Israel.
Imagine something like Dee Brown rewriting Bury My Heart at
Wounded Knee and then turning around and explaining that every
positive accomplishment in America since has only possible thanks
to that act of slaughter.

Rebecca Solnit: The Faraway Nearby (2013, Viking
Adult): Essays, I take it, "about arctic explorers, Che Guevara
among the leper colonies, and Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein, about
warmth and coldness, pain and kindness, decayand transformation,
making art and making self." She has a dozen or more books, all on
things that fascinate me, yet I've only managed to make it through
one slim one.

Alan Weisman: Countdown: Our Last, Best Hope for a Future on
Earth? (2013, Little Brown): Previously wrote The World
Without Us (2007, Thomas Dunne), a speculation on how the Earth
would adjust if human beings were to vanish. In this sequel, he asks
how likely that is, how many people can the Earth sustain, and whether
exceeding those limits -- depleting resources, changing climate, etc. --
could cause a population crash.

Hugh Wilford: America's Great Game: The CIA's Secret Arabists
and the Shaping of the Modern Middle East (2013, Basic Books):
Previously wrote The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played America
(2008). Robert D Kaplan popularized the term "Arabists" some while back
in his book about US State Dept. Arab experts and how they tended to
align with their subjects, especially against Israel. (I don't know
that anyone's bothered to coin a term for pro-Israelis in State and
the CIA, but a comparably long list of names could be rounded up.) So
one "great game" has been between Israel and the Arabs, another between
the US and the UK over influencing the Arabs (a game the UK surrendered
around 1970), and another between the US and the USSR -- any of which
could be the subject here.

Tim Wise: Culture of Cruelty: How America's Elite Demonize
the Poor, Valorize the Rich and Jeopardize the Future
(paperback, 2014, City Lights): Obviously could write a lot more
on this subject than 216 pages. Has mostly written on race politics
in the past, a typical title: Speaking Treason Fluently: Anti-Racist
Reflections From an Angry White Male (2008).

Some recent paperback reissues of book previously listed in hardcover.
These are just a few of those I had noted, and I haven't done up-to-date
research on them:

James Carroll: Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City
Ignited Our Modern World (2011, Houghton Mifflin; paperback,
2012, Mariner Books): Sweeping history of both the real and imagined
city in the various monotheistic religions and imperialist polities
that try to claim her. Most recently, and importantly, that means
Zionist Israel and its ongoing conflict, both for and against the
past.

Lizzie Collingham: The Taste of War: World War II and the
Battle for Food (2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin Books):
Moves from a first book about Indian curries under the British
imperium to a worldwide inquiry into how food and famine were
considered and acted upon by all sides in World War II -- a story
which certainly includes the great Bengal famine.

Joseph Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided
Society Endangers Our Future (2012; paperback, 2013, WW Norton):
Important book by one of our most important economists, showing not
only the structure of increasing inequality in America today but how
that inequality stagnates the economy.

Patrick Tyler: Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the
Military Elite Who Run the Country -- and Why They Can't Make
Peace (2012; paperback, 2013, Farrar Straus and Giroux):
Israel is the world's most militarized nation, its ruling caste
so invested in its military identity that as soon as one supposed
enemy folds they conjure up another: soon after they signed the
peace treaty with Egypt they invaded Lebanon; unsatisfied they
supported Iran in its 1980s war against Iraq, and when Iraq fell
(to the US in 1990 and again in 2003) they started fantasizing
that Iran was out to get them with nuclear weapons. Tyler dates
this back to the early 1950s when David Ben-Gurion turned on his
former protégé Moshe Sharrett for considering peace initiatives.
I think Ben-Gurion's war lust goes deeper, and that it has been
more deeply ingrained in Israeli society, but this book covers
the basic history.

I've read three of these books (Carroll, Stiglitz, Tyler), and
can recommend all of them. The Collingham book looks to be very
interesting.

Tuesday, February 11. 2014

I knew I hadn't done a book thing in quite a while, but was surprised
to check up and find the last one was on
July 26. To try to force myself to do these things more regularly,
I decided to limit them to 40 books each. This one actually runs a
bit long (52 books) in an effort to clear out my backlog and get a
fresh start. Not sure when I'll get the research done for the next
one, but most likely the books are already out there.

By the way, I've actually read the Bacevich and Blumenthal books,
as well as the three I list under new paperbacks (albeit in the
illustrated hardcover editions). I recommend all five, especially
Timothy Noah's The Great Divergence as a good general
introduction to the inequality issue -- a topic Christopher Hayes'
discussion of meritocracy feeds directly into.

Jack Abramoff: Capitol Punishment: The Hard Truth About
Washington Corruption From America's Most Notorious Lobbyist
(2011, WND Books): Out of jail after 43 months, not like he killed
anyone, just redistributed millions of dollars from the public till
to needy clients ("a corporation, Indian tribe, or foreign nation"),
congressmen, and himself and his fellow fixers. And now he's had
a change of heart, trying to raise himself to muckraker from muck.
Problem is, he hasn't had a change of character. As an Amazon reader
put it: "This book could be really good if Abramoff wasn't such a
total narcissist."

Akbar Ahmed: The Thistle and the Drone: How America's War on
Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam (2013, Brookings
Institution Press): One thing US intervention under the "global war on
terror" guise has done is to break down traditional tribal hierarchies,
as jihadists vie with elders as to how to defend communities against
foreign (and to some extent anything modern counts) attack. Author is
Pakistani but solidly wedged into the US foreign policy estate.

Kjell Aleklett: Peeking at Peak Oil (2012, Springer):
An extensive review of the peak oil theory: the idea that the maximum
point of oil extraction occurs when about half of all recoverable oil
has been pumped, and is followed by declining production at elevated
prices. US oil production peaked, as the theory predicted, in 1969,
after which the US had to import oil to meet increasing demand (plus
decreasing production). Recent advances in recovery technology have
complicated things a bit, and the world (unlike the US in 1969) lacks
a cheap external source to fill unmet demand, so the world production
peak (predicted to have occurred some time in 2000-2010) has been a
bit bumpy, but the basic facts remain: oil fields deplete, new ones
become increasingly difficult to find and develop, and virtually no
new oil is being created, so sooner or later we will run out, and
along the way oil will become expensive, a painful way of weaning
us from its use. All that and more should be in here.

Daniel Alpert: The Age of Oversupply: Overcoming the Greatest
Challenge to the Global Economy (2013, Portfolio): Contends
"the invisible hand is broken" by an "oversupply of labor, productive
capacity, and capital relative to the demand for all three." Strikes
me as true, largely the effect of technology on productivity but also
growing inequality which converts those gains almost exclusively to
capital. Not sure what an investment banker like Alpert wants to do
about that, but demand could be increased by more equitable income
distribution, and oversupply of labor can be reduced by increasing
leisure time (which, if adequately supported, would also help out on
the demand front).

Jonathan Alter: The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies
(2013, Simon & Schuster): Thought this might be one of those
"centrist" tomes that balances loathing for the left against a few
nitpicks with the right, but turns out this is just a campaign book,
a recap of the 2012 election, where Obama's centrism worked because
the right went crazy. Alter's previous books were on FDR's 100 days
and on the 100 days he hoped Obama would have in 2009, so figure
he's been disabused of some illusions.

Marc Ambinder/DB Grady: Deep State: Inside the Government
Secrecy Industry (2013, Wiley): Several obvious questions here:
how much of what Edward Snowden is now being hounded for leaking was
known by the "inside" authors here? And how much of what they knew
has been obsoleted by Snowden's revelations? I don't doubt that anyone
who cared to look could have found various pieces of what the NSA has
been up to, and this may help to understand it all. But most likely
we're still far from understanding it all, so this and similar books
are far from definitive. (I notice that Amazon wants to bundle this
with Mark Mazzetti: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends
of the Earth and Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a
Battlefield -- two other key pieces to the puzzle.)

Scott Anderson: Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial
Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East (2013,
Doubleday): Every decade or two someone returns to T.E. Lawrence
for further confirmation of the insights they've finally tuned
into after further mayhem in the Middle East, yet they always
miss the basic point: what makes Lawrence an effective critic
of British (and more recently American) intervention is that he
was helplessly at the center of the problem: he was convinced
he could make it work. This also focuses on Aaron Aaronson, Curt
Prüfer, and William Yale.

Reza Aslan: Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth
(2013, Random House): Wrote one of the more accessible histories of
Islam, No God but God: The Origins and Evolution of Islam, and
a book critical of the Jihadist impulse, Beyond Fundamentalism:
Confronting Religious Extremism in the Age of Globalization. Here
he attempts a historical inquiry into the life of Jesus. Long ago I
read Marcello Craveri's The Life of Jesus, a similar attempt
to flesh out a historical character about whom little is known and
much is imagined. Aslan must know this as well as anyone, but judging
from the cover, I have to wonder whether the association of Jesus with
the Jewish zealot movement isn't imposing something from the modern
mind's must justified fear of violent fundamentalism.

Andrew J Bacevich: Breach of Trust: How Americans Failed
Their Soldiers and Their Country (2013, Metropolitan Books):
Continues the author's critique of American militarism -- cf. The
New American Militarism: How Americans Are Seduced by War (2005),
The Limits of Power: The End of American Exceptionalism (2008),
Washington Rules: America's Path to Permanent War (2010) --
all useful books. Still, I think his argument here, that Washington
has found it too easy to use (and abuse) the all-volunteer Army can
be countered by restoring the draft, is misplaced. He surely recalls
that having "citizen-soldiers" in Vietnam did little to prevent the
politicians and brass from abusing them. Nor did the Army's later
scheme to make itself unable to fight wars without calling up the
reserves deter the Bushes. I don't doubt that the Afghanistan and
Iraq wars have done immeasurable damage to the troops, but you're
never going to end American militarism by fetishizing the troops --
they ultimately have too much stake in perpetuating the system to
buck it, even if many wind up its victims.

Peter Baker: Days of Fire: Bush and Cheney in the White
House (2013, Doubleday): Big (816 pp) instant history of
the two Bush-Cheney terms, based on sympathetic insider interviews
by a long-time White House correspondent. One angle seems to be
questioning who called the shots when -- for much of this time
Billmon commonly referred to the Cheney Administration, while only
occasionally mentioning "Shrub." My impression is that after Cheney's
chief of staff Libby was convicted the tables turned and we went
from the Cheney menace to the Bush muddle, not that anything got
better.

Max Blumenthal: Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel
(2013, Nation Books): The hidden, and rather embarrassing, story revealed
by living a couple years in Israel, of talking to right-wingers in Knesset
and in the streets, to peace activists, and to strange folk who invariably
wind up "shooting and weeping" like David Grossman. I'm not sure he covers
all the bases, but he shows, for instance, how the schools are used to train
Jewish Israelis for military service, and how that reinforces right-wing
political culture. The result is a grossly distorted society.

David Carey/John E Morris: King of Capital: The Remarkable
Rise, Fall, and Rise Again of Steve Schwarzman and Blackstone
(2010; paperback, 2012, Crown Business): Puff book on the largest
private equity company and its billionaire leader, and presumably
a few words about his partner, Pete Peterson -- you know, the guy
who wants to take your Social Security away. The authors buy into
the great moral fallacy of our time: the belief that making obscene
amounts of money is laudable no matter how you do it.

Thurston Clarke: JFK's Last Hundred Days: The Transformation
of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (2013, Penguin
Press): Much speculation about what Kennedy would have done had he
lived and been reëlected, especially given how poorly Lyndon Johnson
fared with Vietnam. McGeorge Bundy later observed that LBJ's basic
Cold War attitude was to make sure he wasn't perceived as weak, JFK's
approach was to make sure he was right. The author argues that JFK's
openness made him a different man at the end of his life than he was
when he ran for president.

Jonathan Crary: 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep
(2013, Verso): Short book (144 pp) on how capitalism's need to sell
you things has chewed up the clock. I suspect this might dovetail
nicely with James Gleick's Faster, had Gleick thought his book
through better instead of just letting it bum rush him.

Diary of a Very Bad Year: Confessions of an Anonymous
Hedge Fund Manager (paperback, 2010, Harper Perennial):
Interviews with an anonymous hedge fund manager from September
2007 to late summer 2009: gives you a chance to view the panic
from the inside, and also to lay out the perspective of a hedge
fund trader, someone always on guard to exploit any given situation.

Terry Eagleton: Across the Pond: An Englishman's View of
America (2013, WW Norton): One might think that the author's
status as one of the world's foremost Marxist literary critics might
have some bearing on how he views America, but most of the examples
I see are stereotypically English views of generic Americans, easy
to come by and more self-sure than is warranted. Other relatively
recent Eagleton books (some reprints of older books, many university
presses): How to Read Literature (2013, Yale); The Event
of Literature (2012; paperback, 2013, Yale); Why Marx Was
Right (paperback, 2012, Yale); On Evil (paperback, 2011,
Yale); Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God
Debate (paperback, 2010, Yale); The Meaning of Life: A Very
Short Introduction (paperback, 2008, Oxford); Literary Theory:
An Introduction (3rd edition, paperback, 2008, Minnesota);
Trouble With Strangers: A Study of Ethics (paperback, 2008,
Wiley-Blackwell); How to Read a Poem (paperback, 2006,
Wiley-Blackwell); Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist
Literary Theory (paperback, 2006, Verso).

Russell Faure-Brac: Transition to Peace: A Defense Engineer's
Search for an Alternative to War (paperback, 2012, iUniverse):
Short book (142 pp), but the basics seem obvious, requiring only a will
to not do stupid and self-destructive things. Of course, coming out of
a war culture, he probably has more stupidity to argue against.

Michael Fullilove: Rendezvous With Destiny: How Franklin
D Roosevelt and Five Extraordinary Men Took America Into the War
and Into the World (2013, Penguin Press): The "five" were
envoys sent by Roosevelt to Europe to lay the foundations for the
future US alliances in WWII, and ultimately the transformation of
the US from isolationism to internationalism and ultimately to our
hallucination of sole superpowerdom -- something that may have
been more true in 1946 than in 1990 (or 2001). There has been a
sudden confluence of eve-of-WWII books, including: Susan Dunn:
1940: FDR, Wilkie, Lindbergh, Hitler -- The Election Amid the
Storm (2013, Yale University Press); Lynne Olson: Those
Angry Days: Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America's Fight Over World
War II, 1939-1941 (2013, Random House); David L Roll: The
Hopkins Touch: Harry Hopkins and the Forging of the Alliance to
Defeat Hitler (2013, Oxford University Press); Maury Klein:
A Call to Arms: Mobilizing America for World War II (2013,
Bloomsbury Press).

Charles Gasparino: Circle of Friends: The Massive Federal
Crackdown on Insider Trading -- and Why the Markets Always Work
Against the Little Guy (2013, Harper Business): Fox business
analyst, which is probably where the "massive federal crackdown"
rhetoric comes from. More dirt on the Galleon Group case, which
is probably better covered by Anita Raghavan: The Billionaire's
Apprentice and Turney Duff: The Buy Side. Gasparino
previously wrote Bought and Paid For: The Unholy Alliance
Between Barack Obama and Wall Street, which is true enough,
but hardly the only "unholy alliance" Wall Street has.

Rosemary Gibson/Janardan Prasad Singh: Medicare Meltdown:
How Wall Street and Washington Are Ruining Medicare and How to Fix
It (2013, Rowman & Littlefield): Given the alternatives
it's tempting to give Medicare a free pass, but the program isn't
immune from the profit-driven US healthcare industry, and the greed
of the latter is as much a threat as the political right. So this
is a real problem, but I'm not sure this book is much of a solution.
Thumbing through it, the "Fifteen Medicare Facts That Will Astonish
You" are mostly astonishing for their abuse of statistics. Gibson
and Prasad also wrote Wall of Silence: The Untold Story of
the Medical Mistakes That Kill and Injure Millions of Americans
(2003, Lifeline Press), The Treatment Trap: How the Overuse of
Medical Care Is Wrecking Your Health and What You Can Do to Prevent
It (2011, Ivan R Dee), and The Battle Over Health Care: What
Obama's Reform Means for America's Future (2012, Rowman &
Littlefield).

Henry A Giroux: America's Education Deficit and the War on
Youth: Reform Beyond Electoral Politics (2013, Monthly Review
Press): Blames "four fundamentalisms: market deregulation, patriotic
and religious fervor, the instrumentalization of education, and the
militarization of society." The other three are right-wing ideology,
but the third is less a theory than a consequence. Conservatives
want to shift the responsibility for success from society to the
individual, which means there will be less wealth and what there
is spread more inequitably. They figure this to be a good thing: if
success is rarer we should appreciate it, and the virtues that help
individuals accumulate it, more, but the net effect is to create a
declining economy where education becomes an ever more dear tool.
That strikes me as less a "war on youth" than gross indifference to
the future of civilization. Giroux has also written: Disposable
Youth: Racialized Memories, and the Culture of Cruelty (paperback,
2012, Routledge), and Youth in Revolt: Reclaiming a Democratic
Future (paperback, 2013, Paradigm).

Doris Kearns Goodwin: The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt,
William Taft, and the Golden Age of Journalism (2013, Simon
& Schuster): Follow-up to her ridiculously acclaimed Lincoln
book, Team of Rivals, taking another juicy slice of hyperbole
and puffs it up to 848 pp.

Laura Gottesdiener: A Dream Foreclosed: Black America and
the Fight for a Place to Call Home (2013, Zuccotti Park Press):
How predatory lending and foreclosure have wracked black America,
contributing to the failure to build real economic security on top
of nominal civil rights gains.

Richard N Haass: Foreign Policy Begins at Home: The Case
for Putting America's House in Order (2013, Basic Books):
Veteran foreign policy mandarin, realist division, but not realist
enough to concede that the gig is up. But he does realize that
American power has always been built on the American economy, so
that's something worth paying some attention to, especially if
you hope to remain a foreign policy mandarin.

Carl Hart: High Price: A Neuroscientist's Journey of Self-Discovery
That Challenges Everything You Know About Drugs and Society
(2013, Harper): A memoir, detailing the author's early interest in
crack addiction as a user before he became a scientist and started
researching others, rethinking how anti-drug laws work and what they
are doing, especially given their racially-selective enforcement,
and providing research on what drugs actually do, which is often not
what you think.

Richard Heinberg: Snake Oil: How Fracking's False Promise
of Plenty Imperils Our Future (paperback, 2013, Post Carbon
Institute): Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing promises
to increase the amount of oil we can extract from already largely
depleted oil fields, and to make the extraction of natural gas
from widespread shale deposits economically attractive -- assuming
you don't get too squeamish about the environmental risks, which
for gas at least are considerable. Heinberg wrote a book in 2003
which declared The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of
Industrial Societies and followed that up in 2007 with Peak
Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, and he's
sticking to his guns here. For less dismal views of fracking,
see: John Graves: Fracking: America's Alternative Energy
Revolution (paperback, 2013, Safe Harbor); Vikram Rao:
Shale Gas: The Promise and the Peril (paperback, 2012,
RTI International); Tom Wilber: Under the Surface: Fracking,
Fortunes, and the Fate of the Marcellus Shale (2012, Cornell
University Press).

Rawn James Jr: The Double V: How Wars, Protest, and Harry
Truman Desegregated America's Military (2013, Bloomsbury
Press): One of the first important breakthroughs in post-WWII civil
rights, partly because it could be done by executive order, but
also, I suspect, because becoming gun fodder wasn't much of a step
up, and trying to maintain segregation in a modern military as
large as the US wanted for its "cold" and not-so-cold wars would
have been a nightmare. Indeed, one can argue that segregation only
survived in the South as long as feudalism did.

Gregg Jones: Honor in the Dust: Theodore Roosevelt, War in
the Philippines, and the Rise and Fall of America's Imperial Dream
(2012; paperback, 2013, NAL): Taking the Philippines from Spain was
the easy part. Crushing their war for independence was a much larger
and more arduous ordeal.

Simon Lack: The Hedge Fund Mirage: The Illusion of Big
Money and Why It's Too Good to Be True (2012, Wiley):
Formerly worked at JPMorgan making investments in hedge funds,
only to find out that despite occasionally spectacular stories
they didn't in general work out.

Mark Leibovich: This Town: Two Parties and a Funeral -- Plus
Plenty of Valet Parking! -- in America's Gilded Capital (2013,
Blue Rider Press): "There are no Democrats and Republians anymore in
the nation's capital, just millionaires. That's the grubby secret of
the place in the twenty-first century. You will always have lunch in
This Town again. No matter how many elections you lose, apologies you
make, or scandals you endure." So don't expect anything on the real
problems America faces; just the surreal ones.

Michael Levi: The Power Surge: Energy, Opportunity, and
the Battle for America's Future (2013, Oxford University
Press): Bullish on US energy from all corners, covering the oil
and gas booms as well as the ever-more-competitive renewables,
seeing bright futures in both. The "battle" is likely to be more
political than economic, as the Kochs and other oil partisans,
for instance, would love to see solar and wind power stamped out.
No indication that nuclear comes into play here at all.

Jonathan Macey: The Death of Corporate Reputation: How
Integrity Has Been Destroyed on Wall Street (2013, FT Press):
When you hire a banker to manage your money, he is supposed to work
for you, to serve your interest. When he uses your money to buy his
bank's toxic securities, he's taken your trust and used it to screw
you. That, in a nutshell, is what banks have turned into since the
"greed is good" age took over. Sure, mostly they screw other people,
but as that becomes habitual it ceases to matter to them who they
screw, or how. And the more they've gotten away with it, the more
they do it: one of Macey's big points is the SEC, created to stop
securities fraud, "got captured," becoming "toothless."

Sebastian Mallaby: More Money Than God: Hedge Funds and
the Making of a New Elite (2010; paperback, 2011, Penguin
Books): Big book on hedge funds, starts with the originators and
tries to cover the field, taking a positive view and covering the
"heroes" when the "villains" have become all the more noteworthy.
Probably useful for all this history, even if the ethics seem a
little shaky.

Jerry Mander: The Capitalism Papers: Fatal Flaws of an
Obsolete System (paperback, 2013, Counterpoint): Former
advertising executive, wrote Four Arguments for the Elimination
of Television in 1977, In the Absence of the Sacred: The
Failure of Technology & the Survival of the Indian Nations
in 1992, and cowrote with Edward Goldsmith The Case Against the
Global Economy: And a Turn Toward the Local in 1997. In the
post-Cold War period the suggestion that capitalism is obsolete
is rank heresy, but it isn't so hard to see that a system dependent
on infinite growth cannot be indefinitely sustained, or that the
way we practice capitalism -- where the rich make up for their
inability to grow adequately by hollowing out everyone else --
leaves much to be desired.

Geoff Mann: Disassembly Required: A Field Guide to Actually
Existing Capitalism (paperback, 2013, AK Press): Short book
(160 pp), reprising economic theory from Marx to Gramsci, looking at
capitalism as a self-destructive as well as productive engine, and
expecting the worst.

Richard Manning: Rewilding the West: Restoration in a
Prairie Landscape (paperback, 2011, University of California
Press): Author of the marvelous Grassland: The History, Biology,
Politics and Promise of the American Prairie (paperback, 1997,
Penguin) returns with a book on a project to create an "American
Serengeti" where a large chunk of Montana is rewilded replete with
buffalo, wolves, elk, grizzly, much as it was when Lewis and Clark
first traipsed through it a scant two hundred years ago.

Leslie McCall: The Undeserving Rich: American Beliefs About
Inequality, Opportunity, and Redistribution (paperback, 2013,
Cambridge University Press): Research on a topic I can only speculate
about. My impression is that throughout most of US history Americans
were quick to condemn the rich, at least in bad times, but over the
last 30-40 years that populist reaction has diminished -- at least
partly due to the success the Cold War has had in characterizing and
championing capitalism as freedom. On the other hand, the rich have
taken advantage of this free pass, and are ripe for revulsion once
again.

Greg Muttitt: Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in
Occupied Iraq (2012, Free Press): Denials to the contrary,
oil was always a big subtext of the US decision to invade Iraq --
how could it have been otherwise when Bush and Cheney were so
steeped in the oil industry culture? It's played out more slowly
than those who carried "no war for oil" placards, or for that
matter the rosy-eyed warmongers in the Bush administration, ever
imagined, but ten years later most of the big western oil companies
are doing business in Iraq, and booking reserves that have become
increasingly hard to find anywhere else. So it's good that someone's
finally pulling this history together. And, by the way, the oil
companies made out on both ends: early on knocking Iraqi oil out
of the market caused shortages and higher prices, and later the
companies got those reserves.

Sönke Neitzel/Harald Welzer: Soldaten: On Fighting, Killing,
and Dying (2012, Knopf): Based on 800 pages of declassified
transcripts of interrogations of German POWs, the book offers "an
unmitigated window into the mind-set of the German fighting man" --
before the Reich fell, before the "Final Solution" was final.

Anthony Pagden: The Enlightenment: And Why It Still Matters
(2013, Random House): I'm not sure that the enlightenment ever achieved
notably enlightened political rule, but the various insights gained
proved (at least until recently) intractable, and as such moved the
reference points for those in power, a considerable feat. Why it still
matters may owe to my parenthetical: although conservatives have always
opposed enlightenment, they have rarely been so successful as lately,
so the story bears repeating. Indeed, the squalor of the past dark
ages should argue strongly against the future dystopia that today's
right-wingers so have their hearts set on.

Christopher S Parker/Matt A Barreto: Change They Can't
Believe In: The Tea Party and Reactionary Politics in America
(2013, Princeton University Press): Argues that the Tea Party isn't
"simple ideology or racism" but draws on the psychological sense of
losing one's country, a "fear that the country is being stolen from
'real Americans.'" And who believes that? Well, mostly racists and
devotees of simple right-wing ideologies. It is ironic that they've
never come closer to running the country than they are now, but their
worst enemy is their own success, because all they truly offer is
ruination. Also see: Lawrence Rosenthal/Christine Trost: Steep:
The Precipitous Rise of the Tea Party (paperback, 2012, University
of California Press); Ronald P Formisano: The Tea Party: A Brief
History (2012, John Hopkins University Press).

Anita Raghavan: The Billionaire's Apprentice: The Rise
of the Indian-American Elite and the Fall of the Galleon Hedge
Fund (2013, Business Plus): Focuses on South Asian emigré
hedge fund traders, especially Galleon Group founder Raj Rajaratnam,
something the Malaysia-born author can relate to. For more on
Galleon: Turney Duff: The Buy Side: A Wall Street Trader's
Tale of Spectacular Excess (2013, Crown Business).

Jonathan Rowe: Our Common Wealth: The Hidden Economy That
Makes Everything Else Work (paperback, 2013, Berrett-Koehler):
Short book (144 pp) on the importance of "the commons" not just to the
economy but to wealth and well-being of all. Published posthumously
with forwards and afterwords by Bill McKibben, David Bollier, and Peter
Barnes. I see numerous testimonies that Rowe was "a unique and original
thinker," so it's nice to have him collected in a book.

Jeffrey D Sachs: To Move the World: JFK's Quest for Peace
(2013, Random House): Focuses on four speeches Kennedy gave during his
last days, covering similar ground to Thurston Clarke: JFK's Last
Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great
President. Sachs is an economist, best known for his contentious
work on world development, so this is something of a pet project.

Jonathan Schlefer: The Assumptions Economists Make
(2012, Belknap Press): It's hard to avoid the impression that most
of what passes for economics is applied logic based on unexamined
assumptions -- it's not that there is no empirical data, but it's
so messy you need models to make sense of it, and most economists
wind up believing their seductively logical models over their lying
eyes. The point here is to examine the unexamined assumptions,
starting with Adam Smith's "invisible hand."

Kevin Sites: The Things They Cannot Say: Stories Soldiers
Won't Tell You About What They've Seen, Done or Failed to Do in War
(paperback, 2013, Harper Perennial): Interviews with eleven US soldiers
who did time in Iraq and/or Afghanistan. There are dozens, maybe hundreds,
of memoirs from these wars -- way too many to list, and one thing they're
unlikely to provide is any historical sense of how or why they were put
into those wars. Karl Marlantes: What It Is Like to Go to War
(2011, Atlantic Monthly Press; paperback, 2011, Grove Press) is similar
on the Vietnam War. Nancy Sherman: The Untold War: Inside the Hearts,
Minds, and Souls of Our Soldiers (2010; paperback, 2011, WW Norton)
tries to cover both Vietnam and the Bush Wars.

Tom Standage: Writing on the Wall: Social Media -- The First
2,000 Years (2013, Bloomsbury): Looks at pre-Internet analogues
to "social media" -- for instance, the much older practice of graffiti.
Author previously wrote An Edible History of Humanity, A
History of the World in 6 Glasses, and most relevantly, The
Victorian Internet: The Remarkable Story of the Telegraph and the
Nineteenth Century's On-line Pioneers.

Benn Steil: The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes,
Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order (2013,
Princeton University Press): The system of monetary exchanges set up
at the Bretton Woods conference held up from 1944 to 1973, a period
of tremendous and widespread growth for both the US and Europe, so
how it came about is bound to be an interesting story.

Chuck Thompson: Better Off Without 'Em: A Northern Manifesto
for Southern Succession (2012; paperback, 2013, Simon &
Schuster): You're more likely to hear southerners urging secession --
Rick Perry is one who made headlines, but then as a Texan he felt
doubly entitled -- but when you look at the political and economic
splits you get a sense of how much of a drag the South places on
the rest of the country. I'm just worried that, living in Kansas,
I might wind up on the wrong side of the border -- Gov. Brownback's
whole agenda amounts to nothing more than Texas-envy, so he for
sure would want to stick with the South.

Euclid Tsakalotos/Christos Laskos: Crucible of Resistance:
Greece, the Eurozone and the World Economy (paperback, 2013,
Pluto Press): Greek leftists, the former an economic professor who
previously wrote 22 Things That They Tell You About the Greek
Crisis That Aren't So, explain the Greek popular revolt against
the Eurobankers' imposition of austerity programs, meant to solve
a problem largely caused by the Euro.

Richard Wolfe: The Message: The Reselling of President
Obama (2013, Twelve): Insider book on the 2012 presidential
election from within the victorious Obama camp, a good chance for
the author to compliment his own brilliance, if you're into that
sort of thing. Wolfe's memoir of the 2008 campaign was Renegade:
The Making of a President. Guess he couldn't use that title
again.

Some recent paperbacks of books previously listed in hardcover:

Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror
Wars (2012; paperback, 2013, Touchstone): Figures the 18
months from 9/11/2001 to the invasion of Iraq tell us all we need
to know about the emergence and development Bush administration's
strategic thinking about war and terror, with a clarity that is only
muddled by the subsequent 5-10 (and counting) years of grappling
with the many failures and complications of such muddled thinking.

Christopher Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After
Meritocracy (2012, Crown; paperback, 2013, Broadway): Shows
how the idea of meritocracy is a two-edged sword: on the one hand,
it accustoms you to thinking that inequality is due to merit; on
the other, Hayes shows how the meritocracy game can be rigged,
and inevitably degrades into oligarchy. He also shows that we're
so far gone down this road one scarcely bothers with meritocracy
any more, even as a shallow excuse.

Timothy Noah: The Great Divergence: America's Growing
Inequality Crisis and What We Can Do About It (2012;
paperback, 2013, Bloomsbury Press): Probably the first book to
start with if you want to understand how incomes and wealth have
diverged since 1973, with the rich and the superrich pulling
ever further ahead while everyone else stagnates or worse.

Friday, July 26. 2013

Threw this one together quick, with no new research, mostly to
drain the scratch file -- which means, sure, these are leftovers
from one or possibly several previous columns. I usually just run
40 books each time, but expanded that a bit here. Again, the idea
is to drain the swamp, so I figured no need to be arbitrary about
it.

By the way, one thing missing here is any listing of recent
conservative books. I've started diverting them into a separate
scratch file for a "special" edition. Only have six at present:
historically I've ignored most I've seen, but occasionally found
something to comment on. Will probably find more, and look at
them then. On the other hand, there are quite a few Israel books
below -- mostly, I suspect, relatively minor ones since I hit up
the more important ones the time before. Thought about doing an
Israel special, but again didn't have that many, and I
think that when I do I'll want to do a "best of" rather than
just sample what's passing in the stream. (Of course, with the
US right as it is, no such thing is conceivable.)

Jeremy Adelman: Worldly Philosopher: The Odyssey of Albert O.
Hirschman (2013, Princeton University Press): Cass Sunstein
wrote a review of this book, extolling Hirschman as one of the century's
"most original and provocative thinkers." Not at all clear to me why,
although he had an interesting life, narrowly escaping the Holocaust
to land in academia.

Elizabeth A Armstrong/Laura T Hamilton: Paying for the Party:
How College Maintains Inequality (2013, Harvard University
Press): Focuses on women, tracking their various paths through higher
education, where they find that "the dominant campus culture indulges
the upper-middle class and limits the prospect of the upwardly
mobile."

Charles V Bagli: Other People's Money: Inside the Housing
Crisis and the Demise of the Greatest Real Estate Deal Ever Made
(2013, Dutton): Focuses on BlackRock as one of the more spectacular
busts of the banking collapse.

Jack Beatty: The Lost History of 1914: Reconsidering the Year
the Great War Began (2012, Walker): Looks like an interesting
reexamination of the not-so-inevitable origins of WWI -- an evident
contrast to Christopher Clark's The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went
to War in 1914. Beatty previously wrote Age of Betrayal: The
Triumph on Money in America, 1865-1900 (2007), an important book
on how money subverted democracy in the Gilded Age.

Walden Bello: Capitalism's Last Stand? Deglobalization in
the Age of Austerity (paperback, 2013, Zed Books): Leftist
author recycles various themes on how capitalism is falling apart.
Deglobalization? Age of Austerity? An excerpt I read argues that
Obama should have paid heed to Paul Krugman, which is true as far
as it goes, but is that all the further a Marxist wants to go?

Amy J Binder/Kate Wood: Becoming Right: How Campuses Shape
Young Conservatives (2012, Princeton University Press):
Studies young conservatives and how they interact with universities,
which for all their reputed liberalism don't seem to be very effective
at brainwashing would-be right-wingers.

Joshua Bloom/Waldo E Martin Jr: Black Against Empire: The
History and Politics of the Black Panther Party (2013,
University of California Press): Black guys with guns serving free
breakfast, now what could be scarier? -- at least if you can imagine
being J. Edgar Hoover. Big book (560 pp), seems to cover all the
angles.

Gary M Burge: Jesus and the Land: The New Testament Challenge
to "Holy Land" Theology (paperback, 2010, Baker Academic):
Previously wrote Whose Land? Whose Promise? What Christians Are
Not Being Told about Israel and the Palestinians (paperback,
2004, Pilgrim Press). I find the very concept of a "holy land,"
"holy places," even a "holy mountain" appalling, but people do get
wound up in such diversions, and if you do this may help disabuse
you of such nonsense. The conflict itself is real.

Christian Caryl: Strange Rebels: 1979 and the Birth of the
21st Century (2013, Basic Books): One of those attempts to
turn history around in a key year, one that featured the Iranian
Revolution and its attendant oil shock, a Russian coup in Afghanistan
that tempted the US to start the Jihadist war against the West, the
key reforms that led by capitalist growth in China, the elevation of
a Polish cold warrior as pope, and the disastrous rise of Margaret
Thatcher -- Ronald Reagan was still a year away.

Christopher Clark: The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War
in 1914 (2013, Harper): Refers to the domino-like march to
war following the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. A more
astute analysis would recognize that all the powers of Europe had
been continuously engaged in war against Asia and Africa for most
of the previous century, and that most had meddled in two wars in
the Balkans within the last decade. Moreover, most of the imperial
wars had been successful, so both sides expected only further success
in bringing the war home, against their real rivals. They may have
sleepwalked, but mostly they dreamed . . . foolishly. Also new and
more narrowly focused, Sean McMeekin: July 1914: Countdown to
War (2013, Basic Books); also new, Charles Emmerson: 1913:
In Search of the World Before the Great War (2013, Public
Affairs).

Laila El-Haddad/Maggie Schmitt: The Gaza Kitchen: A Palestinian
Culinary Journey (paperback, 2013, Just World Books): El-Haddad
previously wrote a down-to-earth memoir of living (and watching people
die) in Gaza (Gaza Mom: Palestine, Politics, Parenting, and Everything
in Between), so this sequel seems appropriate. Rest assured, the
authors "traveled the length and breadth of the Gaza Strip to collect
the recipes presented in this book" (that's 25 miles long and 3.7-7.5
miles wide, a bit larger than Manhattan).

Sylvia Federici: Revolution at Point Zero: Housework, Reproduction,
and Feminist Struggle (paperback, 2012, PM Press): Scattered
essays dating back to 1975, on issues that were kicked around excitedly
back then, less so now. Author was involved in Telos, which I
also worked on way back in the day. She also wrote Caliban and the
Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (paperback, 2004,
Autonomedia).

John Bellamy Foster/Robert W McChesney: The Endless Crisis:
How Monopoly-Finance Capital Produces Stagnation and Upheaval From
the USA to China (2012, Monthly Review Press): Foster is a
Marxist economist who's been writing variations on this all his life.
McChesney is a media critic who started out worried about the untoward
influence of money -- e.g., Rich Media, Poor Democracy: Communication
Politics in Dubious Times (1999; paperback, 2000) -- and wound up
collaborating with the likes of Foster and Noam Chomsky -- Profit
Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order (paperback, 2011,
Seven Stories Press).

Robert Gellately: Stalin's Curse: Battling for Communism
in War and Cold War (2013, Knopf): Claims access to newly
declassified documents tracking Stalin's strategic moves as head
of Comintern and the Soviet Union, although the assumption that
his regime's power interests had anything to do with communism is
far-fetched and annoying. Gellately blames the Cold War on Stalin,
ignoring the fact that conflict existed only if you grant that the
US had interests that conflicted with Stalin's interests -- the
pre-WWII "isolationist" US would have made no such claims.

Richard Hell: I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp: An
Autobiography (2013, Ecco): One of the key musicians in
the mid-1970s New York rock revolution, originally a founder of
Television, later ran the Void-Oids. Seems to be a good writer
as well as a focal point.

Dilip Hiro: Apocalyptic Realm: Jihadists in South Asia
(2012, Yale University Press): Author continues working his way
around the troublespots of Asia, focusing here on the Kashmir
border, which is to say India and Pakistan, although I wouldn't
discount Afghanistan, which in some ways is the shadow of this
long-lived, stubbornly fought dispute.

Joel Isaac/Duncan Bell, eds: Uncertain Empire: American
History and the Idea of the Cold War (paperback, 2012, Oxford
University Press): A dozen scattered essays, no one I recognize and
no clear political bent, but a couple look interesting -- "War Envy
and Amnesia: American Cold War Rewrites of Russia's War"; "God, the
Bomb, and the Cold War: The Religious and Ethical Debate Over Nuclear
Weapons, 1945-1990"; "Blues Under Siege: Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray,
and the Idea of America" -- and one that I wonder about: "Cold War
culture and the Lingering Myth of Sacco and Vanzetti."

Walter Johnson: River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in
the Cotton Kingdom (2013, Belknap Press): A history of slavery
in the US South, especially after the Revolution, the opening of the
west, and the cotton boom.

Daniel Stedman Jones: Masters of the Universe: Hayek,
Friedman, and the Birth of Neoliberal Politics (2012,
Princeton University Press): The other two pictures on the cover:
Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, both looking much younger
than Hayek and Friedman. Neoliberalism is a term that never caught
on among its right-wing adherents, but this is about them. Idea
seems to be to illustrate Keynes' famous maximum about politicians
in thrall to dead economists.

Paul Kennedy: Engineers of Victory: The Problem Solvers Who
Turned the Tide in the Second World War (2013, Random House):
WWII was won with Russian (and Chinese) blood and guts, with American
industry, and with western engineering -- especially in the atom bomb
project one can count a lot of significant refugees from the fascist
powers. The Manhattan Project has been much written about elsewhere,
so this most likely focuses on less esoteric technology, like radar,
and pontoon bridges, and possibly decryption and logistics and the
scientific approach to management, some stuff we've even forgotten
about as the right has turned against government.

Razmig Keucheyan: The Left Hemisphere: Mapping Critical
Theory Today (2013, Verso): A broad survey of Marxist
thinkers in the post-Communist era (since 1993), prefaced by a
brief history of the new left (1956-77) and the 1977-93 period
"of decline." Not sure how important this is, but one thing that
is clear is that post-Cold War triumphalism didn't have much to
stand on: capitalism remained alienating, crisis-prone, and only
got more so as political alternatives melted away.

Denise Kiernan: The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story
of the Women Who Helped Win World War II (2013, Touchstone):
Oak Ridge, TN, home of the Manhattan Project's uranium enrichment
facility, focusing on the numerous women who worked there.

William K Kingaman/Nicholas P. Kingaman: The Year Without a
Summer: 1816 and the Volcano That Darkened the World and Changed
History (2013, St Martin's Press): The volcano was Tambora,
in what is now Indonesia, which ejected a vast amount of ash and
sulfur dioxide gas into the atmosphere, altering weather patterns
all around the world.

Daniel C Kurtzer, ed: Pathways to Peace: America and the
Arab-Israeli Conflict (2012, Palgrave Macmillan): "This
book is the antidote to the fatalism and pessimism" -- or so says
Tony Blair, who as much as anyone is the cause. Bill Clinton,
Javier Solana, and Chuck Hagel also support the book. Kurtzer is
a long-time US diplomat, former ambassador to Egypt and Israel,
a guy with much experience talking the talk, none at walking the
walk. Also wrote the lead piece in The Peace Puzzle: America's
Quest for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (2013, Cornell
University Press).

Les Leopold: How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why
Hedge Funds Get Away With Siphoning Off America's Wealth
(2013, Wiley): How hedge funds work, and how their managers skim
billions off nothing more substantial than bets with other people's
money. Author previously wrote The Looting of America: How Wall
Street's Game of Fantasy Finance Destroyed Our Jobs, Pensions, and
Prosperity (2009).

Bruce Levine: The Fall of the House of Dixie: The Civil War
and the Social Revolution That Transformed the South (2013,
Random House): A Civil War history that emphasizes changes in the
structure of southern society, presumably the end of the slaveholder
aristocracy and its replacement by, well, what exactly? By the time
Reconstruction was ended and Jim Crow laws were imposed it doesn't
seem like much changed, does it?

Antony Loewenstein/Ahmed Moor, eds: After Zionism: One
State for Israel and Palestine (paperback, 2012, Saqi):
The "one state" case. One should recall that it was "facts on the
ground" that made the "two state" scenario plausible. Before the
segregation enforced by expulsion of 700,000 Palestinians during
the 1948 war and the subsequent military occupation, the only
fair solution was one nation with equal rights for all.

Robert W McChesney: Digital Disconnect: How Capitalism Is
Turning the Internet Against Democracy (2013, New Press):
The internet cuts both ways, opening up previously unimagined amounts
of information, allowing extraordinarily wide participation, but also
a tempting target of control, especially for the rich media empires
and their political allies. So it's hard to overstate how important
the struggle over control is. Relevant here: Rebecca MacKinnon:
Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle for Internet
Freedom (2012; paperback, 2013, Basic Books).

Jeffrey Melnick: 9/11 Culture (paperback, 2009,
Wiley-Blackwell): Attempts to work out the reflections and resonances
of the 9/11 attacks on the popular arts. Lots there to chew through,
although now I think we over-indulged, aiding a political agenda
intent on making the world worse than it was. My own thought from
the very beginning was how do you contain this. Then Black Hawk
Down came out.

Moisés Naím: The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields
and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What It Used to Be
(2013, Basic Books): Every tyrant ultimately depends on willing and
competent obedience, and the author detects various trends that make
such obedience harder to come by. Jonathan Schell seemed to be turned
into this notion when he write The Unconquerable World: Power,
Nonviolence, and the Will of the People (2003, Metropolitan),
but he neither explained it well enough nor drew many implications
from the insight.

Vali Nasr: The Dispensable Nation: American Foreign Policy
in Retreat (2013, Doubleday): Bloomberg Review columnist,
former advisor to Richard Holbrooke, author of The Shia Revival:
How Conflicts Within Islam Will Shape the Future and Forces of
Fortune: The Rise of the New Muslim Middle Class and What It Will Mean
for Our World, trying to position himself as a forecaster, has
managed to posit this as "a wake up call" rather than a done deal.
Seems a little glib to me: the US remains crazy-dangerous, and is
almost oblivious to world opinion, even in the relatively sane hands
of Obama, as opposed to the nutters he beat along the way.
[April 23]

Annalee Newitz: Scatter, Adapt, and Remember: How Humans Will
Survive a Mass Extinction (2013, Doubleday): Meteor strikes,
cosmic radiation, whatever it was that ended the Permian, those are
all examples of events so colossal they wiped out the majority of the
world's living species, and given that they have happened, you have
to concede that they could. So how would humans fare under such brutal
circumstances? This is all speculative, of course, but there is a lot
one can do with the set up -- like get things wrong, evidently. Still
another question might be whether humans will survive the the ongoing
mass extinction event they are primarily responsible for -- something
for which there is no historical evidence.

Diana Pinto: Israel Has Moved (2013, Harvard University
Press): Tries to provide a broad strokes portrait of Israeli society
today, something likely to be surprising given how profoundly strange
Israel has become: it is by far the world's most militarized society;
it is perhaps the most rigidly ethnocentric and racist; it is not quite
the most isolated (that would be North Korea), but its view of the map
is profoundly warped; it is well educated and technologically advanced,
but has a profoundly powerful and reactionary religious sector. I have no
idea how this sorts out, and doubt that this is anywhere near definitive.

Sam Pizzigati: The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten
Triumph Over Plutocracy That Created the American Middle Class,
1900-1970 (paperback, 2012, Seven Stories Press): Yeah,
but what would you rather have: a boring old middle class where
most people are pretty much interchangeable, or Donald Trump?

Devon Powers: Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the
Birth of Rock Criticism (paperback, 2013, University of
Massachusetts Press): Focuses on the early work of Richard Goldstein
and Robert Christgau at the Village Voice and the founding of rock
crit as a serious (as well as fun) intellectual activity. Wasn't
much later when I gave up on the Frankfurt School and read little
but rock crit.

Monte Reel: Between Man and Beast: An Unlikely Explorer,
the Evolution Debates, and the African Adventures That Took the
Victorian World by Storm (2013, Doubleday): Paul Du Chaillu,
who explored equatorial Africa 1856-59, discoverng the gorilla just
in time for the debate over Charles Darwin's Origin of Species.

Brant Rosen: Wrestling in the Daylight: A Rabbi's Path to
Palestinian Solidarity (paperback, 2012, Just World Books):
Author is a rabbi in Evanston, IL, with a blog called Shalom Rav
which he has written since 2006.

Douglas Rushkoff: Present Shock: When Everything Happens Now
(2013, Current): Media theorist, won a career achievement award named
after Neil Postman, although the only book of his that I've read was
his unconventional take on Judaism (Nothing Sacred: The Truth About
Judaism). Thesis here seems to be that when you have to absorb
everything at once you get overwhelmed.

William J Rust: Before the Quagmire: American Intervention
in Laos, 1954-1961 (2012, University Press of Kentucky):
Not so sure about the period in question, but during 1961-63 Laos
was more frequently an object of US anti-communist concern than
Vietnam. Same sort of muddle and overkill, of course.

Robert O Self: All in the Family: The Reallignment of American
Democracy Since the 1960s (2012, Hill & Wang): Buys into
the notion that American politics turns on "family values" and that
was the reason for the conservative surge -- sure they'll be flattered
by that magic word -- from the 1970s until the Bush crash (and later?
maybe the Tea Party was just shrapnel). There's something to that, but
I wouldn't bet much on it.

Yehuda Shenhav: Beyond the Two-State Solution: A Jewish
Political Essay (paperback, 2012, Polity): An engineered
solution, most likely astute in its critique of all other so-called
solutions, then myopic on its own. What the author is looking for is
some sort of binational federation combining autonomy and coexistence
in a fair and reasonable way.

William L Silber: Volcker: The Triumph of Persistence
(paperback, 2013, Bloomsbury Press): The architect of the biggest
recession between the 1930s and 2008, done on purpose to slay inflation,
which effectively translated to crippling the working class. Democrats
keep recycling the same hacks over and over, so it wasn't too surprising
to see Obama leaning on the man who ensured Jimmy Carter was a one-term
president. Maybe not all that bad, but it sure could have been done
better.

Chip Walter: Last Ape Standing: The Seven-Million-Year Story
of How and Why We Survived (2013, Walker): The story of human
evolution, such as we understand it, over the period of time that
separates us from our nearest surviving ape kin, during which many
closer species evolved and became extinct, leaving just humans as we
know and love/hate them.

Ben White: Palestinians in Israel: Segregation, Discrimination
and Democracy (paperback, 2011, Pluto Press): From 1948-67
Palestinians in Israel (those who avoided the expulsions) were subject
to military rule, roughly similar to those in the occupied territories
since 1967, and even after 1967 they've remained segregated, nominally
citizens but constantly aware that "the Jewish State" isn't for them.
And as the right wing has grown more powerful (and more extreme) they
are increasingly threatened. Previously wrote Israeli Apartheid:
A Beginner's Guide (2009).

Curtis White: The Science Delusion: Asking the Big Questions
in a Culture of Easy Answers (2013, Melville House): Previously
wrote The Middle Mind: Why Americans Don't Think for Themselves
(2003; paperback, 2004, Harper One), which would be important if he
came up with an answer, but I gather he didn't. (Evidently the book
was scaled up from an essay deriding Terry Gross as a "schlock jock.")
He also wrote one called The Barbaric Heart: Faith, Money, and the
Crisis of Nature (paperback, 2009, Paradigm), so you can get a
sense of his sense of big questions. Science doesn't satisfy him, nor
does religion, nor do "the new atheists." Nothing easy here, but that
doesn't make it right.

Keith W Whitelam: Rhythms of Time: Reconnecting Palestine's
Past (2013, Ben Black Books): Short (124 pp, looks like
Kindle-only) essay on ancient Palestinian history. Author previously
wrote The Emergence of Early Israel in Historical Perspective
(1987), The Invention of Ancient Israel: The Silencing of Palestinian
History (1996), and edited Holy Land as Homeland? Models for
Constructing the Historic Landscapes of Jesus (2011).

James Wolcott: Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and
Semi-Dirty in the Seventies (2011; paperback, 2012,
Anchor): Journalist/culture critic, wrote for the Village Voice
in the 1970s, where he made a strong impression on me. Later
went on to be one of the first successful bloggers, probably
out of scope here.

Lawrence Wright: Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood, and
the Prison of Belief (2013, Knopf): Author of The Looming
Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 (2006), a fine book which
has no special relevance here, other than to show his skill at making
a strange ideology comprehensible without undue sympathy. Still, I've
managed to go through life without needing to know a thing about L.
Ron Hubbard, Dianetics, or Scientology, and figure I'll leave
well enough alone.

Friday, July 19. 2013

I accumulate these things both on bursts and occasionally when I
stumble across something, but I've had trouble getting them collated
into regularly timed chunks of forty. Once again, I have at least
another batch's worth in the queue, and in burst mode to see what I
may have missed that backlog is growing. One indication that I've
waited too long this time is that I've already read two of these
books (Rashid Khalidi, Pamela Olson). One more I've bought and hope
to read soon (Jeremy Scahill), and three more are likely to follow
(Gar Alperovitz, David Graeber, Philip Mirowski). And several more
are possibles (e.g., Robert Kuttner, Michael Pollan, Hedrick Smith),
and there are others I'd like to read but don't forsee the time or
opportunity (e.g., Mark Blyth, William Dalrymple, Michael Hudson,
Gary May, Seamus McGraw). Even George Packer might prove interesting.
So one advantage of waiting so long is the opportunity to be more
selective. Next books post, at least if it happens soon, won't be
so lucky.

Ervand Abrahamian: The Coup: 1953, the CIA, and the Roots
of Modern US-Iranian Relations (2013, New Press): Of course
it was, something never much understood at the time. Previously
wrote A History of Modern Iran (2008), so this is a sort of
prequel, an attempt to understand where all the later mess came
from.

Gar Alperovitz: What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk About
the Next American Revolution (paperback, 2013, Chelsea Green):
Historian -- the first to take a look at what the Hiroshima bombing
meant for US-Soviet diplomacy -- but by now perhaps even better known
for exploring the limits of conventional capitalism in America --
cf. America Beyond Capitalism: Reclaiming Our Wealth, Our Liberty,
and Our Democracy (2004; 2nd ed, paperback, 2011, Democracy
Collaborative). Especially interested in worker-owned companies,
cooperatives, etc.

Mark Blyth: Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea
(2013, Oxford University Press): Dangerously bad, and dangerously
popular, both right-of-center where wrecking the economy is viewed
as a political virtue, and among centrists like Obama who don't
know what's good for themselves. John Quiggin added a chapter to
his Zombie Economics to try to beat it down. More here.

Samuel Bowles/Herbert Gitlin: A Cooperative Species: Human
Reciprocity and Its Evolution (2011; paperback, 2013, Princeton
University Press): Bowles is one of the best-known leftist economists,
editor (with Gintis and Melissa Osborne Groves) of Unequal Chances:
Family Background and Economic Success (paperback, 2008, Princeton
University Press), and author of The New Economics of Inequality
and Redistribution (paperback, 2012, Princeton University Press),
as well as more general texts. Gintis has written a great deal on
things like game theory and education. What they're trying to do
here is situate the human capacity for cooperation within evolutionary
theory, a tricky task as anyone who's bumped heads with sociobiology
should be able to attest. Comes with a daunting amount of math, too.

Richard Breitman/Allan J Lichtman: FDR and the Jews
(2013, Belknap Press): Digs deep into this limited topic, attempting
to "banish forever the notion that Franklin Roosevelt was a blinkered
anti-Semite who made little effort to stop the Holocaust" -- not that
there isn't some truth in those accusations too.

Andrew Scott Cooper: The Oil Kings: How the US, Iran,
and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle
East (2011, Simon & Schuster): Focuses on the 1970s,
when two "oil shocks" hit the stagflationed US economy -- the
OPEC embargo of 1973 and the Iranian revolution of 1979. Using
newly declassified documents, tracks how the US tried to cope
with these events: not very well, no surprise there.

William Dalrymple: Return of a King: The Battle for
Afghanistan, 1839-42 (2013, Knopf): Historian, has mostly
written about India -- e.g., The Last Mughal: The Fall of a
Dynasty: Delhi, 1857 (2007) -- here turns his attention to
what is now called the First Anglo-Afghan War, when the British
initially occupied Kabul with ease but wound up with their entire
mission army destroyed -- only one soldier escaped. I suppose the
Americans think they've done better, but they haven't got out yet.

Mary L Dudziak: Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image
of American Democracy (2000; paperback, 2012, Princeton
University Press): Looks at the civil rights movement in light of
America's cold war crusade. Communists had been first and foremost
supporters of the civil rights movement in the US, and could make
good propaganda use of US racism, ultimately becoming one reason
the federal government intervened. Certainly not the only reason,
but one.

Chrystia Freeland: Plutocrats: The Rise of the New Global
Super Rich and the Fall of Everyone Else (2012, Penguin
Press): Inequality viewed from the top, the breakaway rise of the
top 0.1%, and hopefully something on what this does to the rest
of us. Author previously wrote Sale of the Century: The Inside
Story of the Second Russian Revolution (paperback, 2005,
Abacus), on the making of the post-Soviet oligarchy.

Joshua B Freeman: American Empire: The Rise of a Global
Power, the Democratic Revolution at Home 1945-2000 (2012,
Viking): Parenthetically, "Penguin History of the United States,"
suggesting a part in a series, but the only other such book I've
seen is Hugh Brogan's one-volume (up through the 1980s). Covers
a big chunk of history in 512 pp. -- about the same size and
subject as HW Brands' American Dreams: The United States
Since 1945 (2010, Penguin Books).

Eduardo Galeano: Children of the Days: A Calendar of Human
History (2013, Nation Books): After his classic book Open
Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,
Galeano has written a number of elliptical meta-histories -- John Berger
calls them "bedtime stories -- of which this is either more or perhaps
some sort of summation: a vignette for each day of the year, meant to
reveal much more. Other books in this vein: Genesis: Memory of Fire,
Volume 1; Faces and Masks: Memory of Fire, Volume 2; Century
of the Wind: Memory of Fire, Volume 3 (all three: paperback, 2010,
Nation Books); Mirrors: Stories of Almost Everyone (same);
Upside Down: A Primer for the Looking-Glass World (paperback,
2001, Picador); Voices of Time: A Life in Stories (paperback,
2007, Picador).

Barbara Garson: Down the Up Escalator: How the 99 Percent
Live in the Great Recession (2013, Doubleday): Not very well,
but most working people have been practicing for the downfall for
decades, as companies have squeezed them, cut down on benefits and
kept up the pressure for more hours and more productivity. Garson
talks of a "long recession" dating back to around 1970.

Martin Gilens: Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality
and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University
Press): Another book on the effects of growing income inequality in
the US, an effect that is not just reflected but amplified in terms
of political power. Previously wrote Why Americans Hate Welfare:
Race, Media, and the Politics of Antipoverty Policy (1999;
paperback, 2000, University of Chicago Press).

Melvin A Goodman: National Insecurity: The Cost of American
Militarism (paperback, 2013, City Lights): Ex-CIA analyst,
wrote Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA
(2008), certainly a good place to start on his bigger theme.

David Graeber: The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a
Movement (2013, Spiegel & Grau): Anthropologist, wrote the
widely admired (or at least debated) Debt: The First 5,000 Years
(2011, Melville House); was deeply involved in Occupy Wall Street, so
this is first-draft history from the middle of the action, hopefully
with some deep thinking tossed in, especially about democracy.

Raymond G Helmick: Negotiating Outside the Law: Why Camp
David Failed (2004, Pluto Press): A Jesuit priest, Professor
of Conflict Resolution, and mediator during the Camp David talks,
places blame for the failure of the summit on the unwillingness of
all parties to recognize applicable international law and position
their goals within that framework. Based on what I know from Charles
Enderlin: Shattered Dreams: The Failure of the Peace Process in
the Middle East, 1995-2002 (2003, Other Press), and Clayton E
Swisher: The Truth About Camp David: The Untold Story About the
Collapse of the Middle East Peace Process (2004, Nation Boks),
that makes sense.

Michael Hudson: Finance Capitalism and Its Discontents 1:
Interviews and Speeches, 2003-2012 (paperback, 2012, Islet):
Also wrote The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital, Debt Deflation
and Global Crisis (paperback, 2012, Islet), and going back a ways,
Super Imperialism: The Origin and Fundamental of US World Dominance
(new edition, paperback, 2003, Pluto Press), an unorthodox economist
who has been exceptionally sharp at predicting the 2008 collapse. This
collects his map of the path to the brink, while The Bubble and
Beyond shows us the chasm beyond.

Neil Irwin: The Alchemists: Three Central Bankers and a
World on Fire (2013, Penguin Press): Focuses on central
banks in the US (Ben Bernanke), UK (Mervyn King), and Europe
(Jean-Claude Trichet), how they've handled the financial meltdown
from August 2007 forward -- and hopefully pointing out how they
haven't handled it very well.

Daniel Cay Johnston: The Fine Print: How Big Companies
Use "Plain English" to Rob You Blind (2012, Portfolio):
Muckracker, previously wrote Perfectly Legal: The Covert
Campaign to Rig Our Tax System to Benefit the Super Rich -- and
Cheat Everybody Else (2003), and Free Lunch: How the
Wealthiest Americans Enrich Themselves at Government Expense
(and Stick You With the Bill) (2007). Here he discovers
what Woody Guthrie knew all along: some people will rob you
with a fountain pen. Dylan Ratigan is stalking the same beast,
but appears to have fried his brain on the title: Greedy
Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate Communists, Banksters,
and Other Vampires From Sucking America Dry (paperback,
2012, Simon & Schuster).

Rashid Khalidi: Brokers of Deceit: How the US Has Undermined
Peace in the Middle East (2013, Beacon Press): Could be about
any number of areas in the Middle East where the US has sold arms and
worked against peace -- Khalidi's Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and
American Hegemony in the Middle East (2009) takes such a general
view -- but this one is specifically about Israel/Palestine, focusing
on three episodes where the US not only failed to bring Israel to the
peace table but arguably collaborated with Israel's right-wing hawks
to undermine the US's own stated intentions: Reagan's 1982 plan,
Bush's 1991 Madrid Conference, and Obama's 2009 initiative.

Mattea Kramer, et al. [National Priorities Project]: A People's
Guide to the Federal Budget (paperback, 2010, Olive Branch Press):
Basic info on what the budget is, how the process works, etc. -- subjects
lots of people are woefully ignorant of. Doubt that it goes much further,
but clearly fills a need.

Robert Kuttner: Debtor's Prison: The Politics of Austerity
Versus Possibility (2013, Knopf): Not only is austerity
economically counterproductive, at least within a recession, its
attraction is purely political, as is the decision to follow its
dictates. Kuttner knows this, and presumably has some worthwhile
suggestions, but right now it is mainly a test of political will --
something Obama, in particular, doesn't seem to understand.

Jaron Lanier: Who Owns the Future? (2013, Simon &
Schuster): Previously wrote You Are Not a Gadget: A Manifesto
(2010), and is credited as "the father of virtual reality." Argues
that "the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and
decimated the middle class," and proposes some things -- short of
Luddism, which probably wouldn't work anyway -- to ameliorate all
that. I don't buy the causal argument, but he may have some points
on networks exacerbated other trends that are primarily political.

Gary May: Bending Toward Justice: The Voting Rights Act
and the Transformation of American Democracy (2013, Basic
Books): An important story in the civil rights movement: why voting
mattered, how bitterly white supremacists fought it, how their
violence turned much of the nation against them, resulting in a
landmark law the Supreme Court has just gone out of its way to
gut.

Mark Mazzetti: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the
Ends of the Earth (2013, Penguin Press): Book cover has
a helicopter but it's really the drone that has transformed the
CIA's mission from gathering and analyzing "intelligence" to a
rogue organization of assassins.

Seamus McGraw: The End of the Country: Dispatches From
the Frack Zone (paperback, 2012, Random House): We're
working through a cycle where as we deplete relatively easy oil
and gas resources, we try to tap into more difficult resources
with more advanced technology. One such is gas trapped in narrow
seams of shale: only recently it's become possible to drill into
those seams then horizontally to open up more of the seam; then
a toxic chemicals is pumped into the well and an explosion set
off, driving the chemicals to fracture the rock and release more
gas (this is called "hydrofracturing" or "fracking"). This book
focuses on Pennsylvania, where pretty much everything that could
go wrong with this technology has gone wrong.

Philip Mirowski: Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste:
How Neoliberalism Survived the Financial Meltdown (2013,
Verso): As I recall, there was a fleeting instant during the early
days of the meltdown when at least a few people started to wonder
whether there wasn't something seriously flawed in capitalism --
at least our recent, highly financialized version of it -- at the
root of the crisis. But it turned out to be nothing like the air
of revolution kicked up by the 1930s: no sooner than the banks got
bailed out their apologists reverted to the party line.

Pankaj Mishra: From the Ruins of Empire: The Intellectuals
Who Remade Asia (2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Focuses
on Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (from Iran, despite his assumed name),
Rabindranath Tagore (India), and Liang Qichao (China), figures who
became prominent around 1900, which is to say well before the major
anti-imperialist successes following WWII. I know a fair amount
about al-Afghani, who's been given wildly erratic interpretations
depending on which axe which writer wanted to sharpen. Ultimately,
while such early reactions (at once modernist and reactionary) to
European imperialism are interesting, I suspect they are fleeting
as later generations learned more about both their enemies and
themselves. Mishra has several books poking at this beast; most
recently, Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India,
Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond (2007).

Pamela J Olson: Fast Times in Palestine: A Love Affair With
a Homeless Homeland (paperback, 2013, Seal Press): American,
from Oklahoma, graduated with a degree in physics then decided she
wanted to see the world, picking Occupied Palestine in a perverse
reaction to anti-American sentiments following Bush's invasion of
Iraq. She lived in Ramallah for two years, collecting this informal,
and increasingly politically astute, travelogue.

George Packer: The Unwinding: An Inner History of the New
America (2013, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Character sketches:
tobacco farmer turned "new economy evangelist" in the rural South;
Rust Belt factory worker; Washington insider "oscillating between
political idealism and the lure of money"; Silicon Valley billionaire;
interweaved with "biographical sketches of the era's leading public
figures, from Newt Gingrich to Jay-Z, and collages made from newspaper
headlines, advertising slogans, and song lyrics" -- I mean, how else
would someone who's proven himself incapable of critical thought go
about taking the temper of the times?

Michael Pollan: Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation
(2013, Penguin): The food guy discovers chemistry. Unlikely there is a
single thing here not already in Harold McGee: On Food and Cooking:
The Science and Lore of the Kitchen, not that he hasn't earned the
right to tell the story his way.

Jeremy Scahill: Dirty Wars: The World Is a Battlefield
(2013, Nation Books): Previously wrote about US use of mercenaries in
Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army
(2007). Here goes from Afghanistan to Yemen, Somalia, the cutting edges
of American "black ops" -- the undeclared, undebated skirmishes today
that will become the quagmires of tomorrow.

James C Scott: Two Cheers for Anarchism: Six Easy Pieces
on Autonomy, Dignity, and Meaningful Work and Play (2012,
Princeton University Press): Examples of anarchist values against
the backdrop of state-ruled society, a pragma for the real world,
skepticism about the state rather than an idealist rejection of it.
Previous books include: Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of
Peasant Resistance (1987); Seeing Like a State: How Certain
Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed (1999);
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland
Southeast Asia (2010).

Roger Scruton: How to Think Seriously About the Planet:
The Case for an Environmental Conservatism (2012, Oxford
University Press): Acknowledges that environmental issues are real
concerns, but insists on "local initiatives over global schemes,
civil association over political activism, and small-scale
institutions of friendship over regulatory hyper-vigilance."
It would be easier to imagine such small-scale volunteerism
working if corporations were also small-scale and local, and
if communities were held together by mutual concerns instead
of torn apart by the current inequitable distribution of wealth --
hitherto the main mission of conservatives.

Tavis Smiley/Cornel West: The Rich and the Rest of Us
(paperback, 2012, Smiley Books): While the Middle Class is being
decimated, those who don't quite rank with them are getting hit
hard too, if for no other reason than to put the fear of failure
into the Middle Class. Authors do some radio; they should have
much to rant about.

Hedrick Smith: Who Stole the American Dream? (2012,
Random House): Scottish journalist, previously wrote The Power
Game: How Washington Works (1996) and Rethinking America
(1995), as well as a couple books on Russia. Covers much the same
material as Donald Barlett/Richard Steele: The Betrayal of the
American Dream and several other books (some use Middle Class
almost interchangeably).

Ehud Sprinzak: Brother Against Brother: Violence and Extremism
in Israeli Politics from Altalena to the Rabin Assassination
(1999, Free Press): Not a new book, but first I've seen of it, and it
does cover many well known examples where Israelis resorted to murder
to advance of their political agenda -- Baruch Goldstein and Yigal Amir
being pivotal figures in wrecking the 1990s Peace Process, and one can
think of other cases going back to the heyday of the Stern Gang.

Amelia Stein, ed: The American Spring: What We Talk About
When We Talk About Revolution (paperback, 2012, Arcade):
Brief "conversations with artists, activists, and thinkers," more
or less tied to Occupy Wall Street but often notable in their own
right. Occupy-themed books are starting to roll out, mostly short
ones: Janet Byrne, ed: The Occupy Handbook (paperback, 2012,
Back Bay Books); Carla Blumenkranz, ed: Occupy! Scenes from
Occupied America (paperback, 2011, Verso); Lenny Flank, ed:
Voices From the 99 Percent (paperback, 2011, Red and Black);
Susan van Gelder, ed: This Changes Everything: Occupy Wall
Street and the 99% Movement (paperback, 2011, Berrett-Koehler);
Writers for the 99%: Occupying Wall Street: The Inside Story
of an Action That Changed America (paperback, 2012, Haymarket);
Todd Gitlin: Occupy Nation: The Roots, the Spirit, and the
Promise of Occupy Wall Street (paperback, 2012, It Books).

David Stuckler/Sanjay Basu: The Body Economic: Why Austerity
Kills (2013, Basic Books): Both authors are doctors, focused
on public health and epidemiology. I've seen books that map out bad
health outcomes from growing inequality (e.g., Richard Wilkinson/Kate
Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality Makes Societies
Stronger). Austerity, a politico-economic doctrine that makes
economics weaker, mostly at the expense of the poor, should have the
same effect, and evidently does.

Cass R Sunstein: Simpler: The Future of Government
(2013, Simon & Schuster): Maybe those people complaining about
the Obama administration's hyperactive regulatory syndrome actually
have something to talk about. The co-author of Nudge: Improving
Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, the manifesto of
"libertarian paternalism," has long been a prominent Obama adviser,
and headed the White House Office of Information and Regulatory
Affairs for three years. Here he touts all the stuff he did, or
wanted to do, and why it's good for you, even if you never noticed
the difference. One problem with Sunstein's brand of paternalism
is that it's something liberals are always accused of, and while
it may be a good thing up to a point -- the opposite camp seems to
want to go out of its way to make government complex and mysterious,
to sabotage any sense that it might be good for things -- it's easy
for people who think they know what's good for you to get carried
away.

Odd Arne Westad: Restless Empire: China and the World
Since 1750 (2012, Basic Books): Survey of Chinese foreign
policy since they invaded Burma in the 1760s to the present, not
that you'd think there was much to write about before 1948 (or
1938). This may provide some fodder for those who see China as
a big threat to yet another American Century. Hard to extrapolate,
but history does come back in strange forms.

I haven't done any new research here, but it occurs to me that
some of the paperback notes -- reprints of books I wrote about when
they originally appeared -- are so dated I should kick them out as
soon as possible. Don't have any book page notes to link to -- as
you may have noticed, those pages disappeared after some authors
and/or their lawyers got huffy about "excessive" quoting. So here
goes:

Peter Beinart: The Crisis of Zionism (2012, Times
Books; paperback, 2013, Picador): Liberal pundit with bad instincts
but smart enough to sometimes think past them, as he did when the
Iraq War soured, faces up to his beloved Zionism and finds a nation
at war with his sense of justice, and even makes a case for limited
BDS. Would be more useful if he didn't seem to be even more bothered
by American Jews marrying goyim.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the
War for Afghanistan (2012, Knopf; paperback, 2013, Vintage):
Focuses on Helmand, home of a longstanding, never fully successful
US hydro-project called "Little America," showing how wave after
wave of US military power never managed to do anything constructive
in one of the most intensively patrolled areas in Afghanistan.

Steve Coll: Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
(2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin Press): Corporate biography from the
Exxon Valdez disaster to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, with plenty
of bumps along the way, as well as extraordinary profits, much on the
tricky relationship between bookable reserves and stock price (with
the reserves moving ever deeper into unconventional oil), tenacious
defense against suits, and intense political lobbying, especially to
keep the government from doing anything about greenhouse gasses and
global warming.

Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle
and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2012, Metropolitan
Books; paperback, 2012, Picador): Mostly focuses on the rise of the
Tea Party movement, and how it was funded and manipulated by a few
billionaires.

David Graeber: Debt: The First 5,000 Years (2011;
paperback, 2012, Melville House): Anarchist anthropologist argues
that credit/debt goes way back, predating money, not to mention
much of what we call civilization. Consensus seems to be that he's
"a brilliant, deeply original political thinker" (Rebecca Solnit)
who occasionally goes off the deep end.

Michael Hastings: The Operators: The Wild and Terrifying
Inside Story of America's War in Afghanistan (2012, Blue
Rider Press; paperback, 2012, Plume): The author's drinking binge
with Gen. Stanley McChrystal and his staff in Europe got the hero
of the COIN surge in Afghanistan sacked, but even more devastating
is his coverage of McChrystal's succesor, Gen. David Petraeus --
who managed to get away with his incompetence in Kabul, only to
blow up a few months later.

Tony Judt/Timothy Snyder: Thinking the Twentieth Century
(2012; paperback, 2013, Penguin): Structured as an interview, laced
with memoirs repeating others of Judt's post-ALS books (e.g., The
Memory Chalet), but expanded to provide a final reckoning with
20th century European thought (and America, and Israel). His last
book, one to savor.

Paul Krugman: End This Depression Now! (2012;
paperback, 2013, WW Norton): Reasserts the important insights of
macroeconomic theory, especially Keynes and Minsky, but he also
cares about the human cost of letting the depression bottom out.
Could have gone deeper into the political roots of the nonsense
you hear about debt and inflation and austerity instead of just
demolishing them on economic grounds.

Michael Lewis: Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World
(2011; paperback, 2012, WW Norton): Thumbnail portraits of several
countries suffering from the the finance meltdown: Greece, Ireland,
Iceland, the United States. Very readable, draws sensible conclusions.

Tracie McMillan: The American Way of Eating: Undercover at
Walmart, Applebee's, Farm Fields and the Dinner Table (2012;
paperback, 2012, Scribner): Research done by working for the companies
that handle America's food.

Lawrence Mishel/Josh Bivens/Elise Gould/Heidi Shierholz: The
State of Working America (12th edition, paperback, 2012, ILR
Press): Since its first edition in 1988, the basic stats and analysis
of what it's like to work in America.

Juliet B Schor: True Wealth: How and Why Millions of Americans
Are Creating a Time-Rich, Ecologically Light, Small-Scale, High-Satisfaction
Economy (paperback, 2011, Penguin Books): Reissue with new (and
better) title of Schor's 2010 book, Plenitude: The New Economics of
True Wealth. Schor previously wrote several books on how we are
overworked and how we've been conditioned to overspend, so this is a
proper summing up.

Ben Shephard: The Long Road Home: The Aftermath of the Second
World War (2011, Knopf; paperback, 2012, Vintage): A history
of postwar relief efforts (mostly American) to deal with people
displaced by WWII -- Jews you are probably vaguely familiar with,
but there were many more, moved to escape armies, moved to work
in plants (both voluntarily and impressed), some with homes to go
to, many without.

Ron Suskind: Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and
the Education of a President (2011; paperback, 2012, Harper):
Mostly on Obama and his inner circle of economic experts, especially
the controlling influence of Larry Summers and the divided loyalties
of Tim Geithner (actually, that's probably too charitable; Geithner
actively sabotaged Obama orders that would have further curtailed
the big banks). Could have done more with the title, since one of
Obama's big mistakes was thinking that the economy would heal if
only he could restore confidence in it, so therefore he projected
an excessively optimistic stance, which crippled his options while
fooling no one.

For the record, I've read most of the books in the paperback
section (mostly in hard cover). Specifically: Beinart, Chandrasekaran,
Coll, Frank, Hastings, Judt, Krugman, Lewis, Schor, Shephard, and
Suskind; i.e., not Graeber, McMillan, Mishel. Wouldn't have bothered
writing up the latter ones had I not been interested.

Tuesday, April 23. 2013

Still trying to unpack the overhang accumulated up to the
March 14 post, with a second installment on
March 16, although this one is delayed about as much as I should
normally do -- one result is that the queue isn't getting noticeably
shorter. So here's another batch of forty more/less recent book titles,
with more to follow relatively soon.

Nicholson Baker: The Way the World Works: Essays
(2012, Simon & Schuster): Fifteen years of short pieces by the
mostly novelist, including a couple I would certainly want to read
("The Charms of Wikipedia," and "Why I Am a Pacifist," the first
of three in the section on War). I haven't read his fiction, but
Human Smoke: The Beginnings of World War II, the End of
Civilization is a great book.

William J Baumol, et al: The Cost Disease: Why Computers Get
Cheaper and Health Care Doesn't (2012, Yale University Press):
An important subject, although it's not clear that Baumol has got the
answer right: health care is a dysfunctional market with a lot of
hidden (and frankly cancerous) monopolies. Other factors may add to
this, including some Baumol identifies (labor costs, lack of
productivity improvements).

William Blum: America's Deadliest Export: Democracy: The
Truth About US Foreign Policy and Everything Else (paperback,
2013, Zed Books): Longtime critic of US foreign policy. Previous
books include: The CIA: A Forgotten History (1986); Rogue
State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower (2000); West-Bloc
Dissident: A Cold War Memoir (2002); Killing Hope: US Military
and CIA Interventions Since World War II (2000; revised 2003);
Freeing the World to Death: Essays on the American Empire
(2004).

David Byrne: How Music Works (2012, McSweeney's):
Talking Heads frontman, Luaka Bop honcho, applies his experience
to a big topic, although I can imagine lots of different tangents
for "works" to take off in. Most likely: how music works for me.
Still, a topic of some interest.

Caitlin Carenen: The Fervent Embrace: Liberal Protestants,
Evangelicals, and Israel (2012, New York University Press):
The US has lots of reasons for being exceptionally sympathetic to
Israel, ranging from the founding bond of both being white settler
nations to the symbiosis of our overbloated arms industries, but
one of the most important is how Israel has played in protestant
thought -- both early on with liberal guilt over the Holocaust and
later with evangelicals pining for the apocalypse.

Victor Cha: The Impossible State: North Korea, Past and
Future (2012, Harper Collins): Former Bush admin NSC Korea
hand -- you know, the folks who concocted "the axis of evil" meme --
tries to explain North Korea, something I'm not sure anyone can do.
A couple years ago, when Barbara Demick wrote Nothing to Envy:
Ordinary Lives in North Korea (2009) there weren't many books,
but that's started to change. Relatively new: Andrei Lankov: The
Real North Korea: Life and Politics in the Failed Stalinist Utopia
(2013, Oxford University Press); BR Myers: The Cleanest Race: How
North Koreans See Themselves and Why It Matters (2010; paperback,
2011, Melville House); Bruce E Bechtol Jr: The Last Days of Kim
Jong-Il: The North Korean Threat in a Changing Era (2013, Potomac
Books). Still, I doubt if any on these shed much light on the latest
round of threats and condemnations.

Noam Chomsky: 9-11: Was There an Alternative? (2001;
revised paperback, 2011, Seven Stories Press): Right then, right now.
Wish he could write better, but decades of being right and ignored
have taken a toll on his patience.

Noam Chomsky: Occupy [Occupied Media Pamphlet Series]
(paperback, 2012, Zucotti Park Press): Short (128 pp.) pamphlet,
meant to advise the Occupy movement. Looks like there will be a
series of these things, with additional titles by Stuart Leonard
(Taking Brooklyn Bridge), Mumia Abu-Jamal (Message to
the Movement), and Marina Sitrin/Dario Azzellini (Occupying
Language).

Noam Chomsky: Power Systems: Conversations on Global Democratic
Uprisings and the New Challenges to US Empire (paperback, 2013,
Metropolitan Books): Continues a long series of interviews with David
Barsamian, a context which draws out his wisdom without cluttering up
the page.

Climate Central: Global Weirdness: Severe Storms, Deadly
Heat Waves, Relentless Drought, Rising Seas, and the Weather of
the Future (2012, Pantheon): Written by Emily Elert and
Michael D Lemonick but credited to their "nonprofit, nonpartisan
science and journalism organization"; with just-the-facts-style
reporting, not that they ignore the applicable science.

Susan P Crawford: Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry
and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age (2012, Yale
University Press): Argues that the 2011 merger of Comcast and NBC
Universal "create the biggest monopoly since the breakup of Standard
Oil a century ago." During much of that time AT&T monopolized
the telephone industry, but at least it was recognized as such and
tightly regulated -- so much so that it begged for breakup. The
new monopoly combines content as well as networking, which is what
makes it not just too expensive but far more dangerous.

Guy Debord: Comments on the Society of the Spectacle
(1987; third edition, paperback, 2011, Verso): Debord's original essay
was written in 1967. When I first read it (in Radical America,
1970) it illuminated all sorts of things, but the basic idea is simple
enough it requires little elaboration. The essay is short, as are the
comments (94 pp.); still, I've never figured out what you do with the
concept -- more likely than not it just leaves you awestruck.

John De Graaf/David K Batker: What's the Economy For, Anyway?:
Why It's Time to Stop Chasing Growth and Start Pursuing Happiness
(2011; paperback, 2012, Bloomsbury Press): Good question, one also
explored by Robert Skidelsky/Edward Skidelsky: How Much Is Enough?
Money and the Good Life (2012); Juliet B Schor: Plenitude: The
New Economics of True Wealth (2010); and Joseph E Stiglitz, et al.,
Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Ad Up (2010).
[link]

Ross Douthat: Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of
Heretics (2012, Free Press): Conservative New York Times
columnist, tries to appear reasonable and rarely succeeds, wants
to bring back that old time religion, or something like that.
We would at long last do us a favor if he helps break the binds
between religion and partisanship, but the old time religion
never was much good at respecting others.

Peter Dreier: The 100 Greatest Americans of the 20th Century:
A Social Justice Hall of Fame (paperback, 2012, Nation Books):
Thumbnail biographies, 4-6 pages each (adding up to 512 pp.), political
people you should know at least something about, even though one can
nitpick the roster coming and going. Only two are younger than me
(Michael Moore and Tony Kushner). Three of the last ten are musicians,
and two are athletes, so the spectacle seems to have won out, especially
over the writers who have provided so much insight and kept the flame
going (Chomsky and Ehrenreich are about it since C. Wright Mills).

Jeff Faux: The Servant Economy: Where America's Elite Is
Sending the Middle Class (2012, Wiley): Previous book was
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our
Future -- and What It Will Take to Win It Back, so presumably
this returns to American specifics. Lots of recent books on the
destruction of the middle class, the ripe corrollary to the same
old, same old of rich-getting-richer and poor-getting-poorer.

Jonathan Fetter-Vorm: Trinity: A Graphic History of the First
Atomic Bomb (2012, Hill and Wang): Much shorter than Richard
Rhodes' epochal The Making of the Atomic Bomb, but they say a
picture is worth a thousand words. I've toyed with the idea of writing
graphic histories on the Cold War and the Arab-Israeli Conflict --
critical assumption here is that I can get my nephew to illustrate --
mostly because I wish to sharply focus on key understandings rather
than to just spew out a lot of narrative, and graphic histories seem
to offer a unique opportunity to state and reinforce basic points.

Robert K Fitts: Banzai Babe Ruth: Baseball, Espionage, and
Assassination During the 1934 Tour of Japan (2012, University
of Nebraska Press): Previously co-edited Remembering Japanese
Baseball: An Oral History of the Game and wrote Wally Yonamine:
The Man Who Changed Japanese Baseball, reports on one of the most
famous exhibition tours in history: a key event in Japan's adoption
of America's pastime as its own favorite sport, but also cover for
Moe Berg's espionage. Not sure who got assassinated.

Stephen M Gardiner: A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical
Tragedy of Climate Change (2011, Oxford University Press):
A philospher's take on the problem, seeing ignorance and inaction
as a lapse in ethics, looking into geo-engineering, etc.

Brandon L Garrett: Convicting the Innocent: Where Criminal
Prosecutions Go Wrong (2011; paperback, 2012, Harvard
University Press): DNA evidence has shown that quite a few innocent
people have been convicted of serious crimes. Analyzing those cases
should help identify how the justice system gets it wrong and winds
up creating injustice. Other recent books on this: Jim Petro/Nancy
Petro: False Justice: Eight Myths That Convict the Innocent
(2011, Kaplan); Daniel S Medwed: Prosecution Complex: America's
Race to Convict and Its Impact on the Innocent (2012, NYU
Press).

Wenonah Hauter: Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of
Food and Farming in America (2012, New Press): "Local food"
farmer, director of Food & Water Watch, explains how agricultural
policy has been designed to aid Cargill, Tyson, Kraft, and ConAgra.

Tim Kane: Bleeding Talent: How the US Military Mismanages
Great Leaders and Why It's Time for a Revolution (2012,
Macmillan Palgrave): Right-wing economist (Hudson Institute, John
McCain), former USAF "intelligence" officer, "startup maven" (to
quote Bush economist Glenn Hubbard). I suspect his thesis is right,
but I have my doubts that "great leaders" is something the we need
the military to have, right now, or just about ever. Bean counters
and shrinks, that's another story.

Frederick Kaufman: Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being
Food (2012, Wiley): Starting with Domino's Pizza, hits all
the usual stops surveying the contemporary food industry, how it's
all related and tied more to finance than to old-fashioned interests
like agriculture. Related: Kara Newman: The Secret Financial
Life of Food: From Commodities Markets to Supermarkets (2012,
Columbia University Press).

George Lakoff/Elisabeth Wehling: The Little Blue Book: The
Essential Guide to Thinking and Talking Democratic (paperback,
2012, Free Press): Lakoff thinks we can solve all our problems by
coming up with better terminology to frame our arguments -- i.e.,
something other than what Frank Luntz comes up with. Supposedly this
is that.

Chris Lamb: Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the
Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball (2012, University of
Nebraska Press): Previously wrote Blackout: The Story of Jackie
Robinson's First Spring Training, digs deeper here into the
press attitudes that reinforced the color line in baseball, and
a few journalists -- mostly blacks and/or communists, by the way --
who thought differently.

Charlie LeDuff: Detroit: An American Autopsy (2013,
Penguin Press): Local journalist, has watched Detroit decline from
1.9 million people to fewer than 700,000, as people left the city
for the suburbs or beyond while industry crumbled. I recall that
when I was visiting Detroit it was hard to find books on the city,
but that at least is looking up. For example, another is Mark Binelli:
Detroit City Is the Place to Be: The Afterlife of an American
Metropolis (2012, Metropolitan).

Jonathan Lethem: The Ecstasy of Influence: Nonfictions,
Etc. (2011, Doubleday): A novelist based in Brooklyn
dumps off scattered essays, mostly lit, some about music. Poking
around Amazon's "look inside" I can't get a sense of the whole,
but one fragment on "Disnial" is certainly sharp.

Jonathan Lethem: Talking Heads' Fear of Music
(paperback, 2012, Continuum): Part of their 33 1/3 series of
short books, where a writer picks out a single record and riffs
on it. This is number 86, a rare case with a celebrity author.

Audrea Lim, ed: The Case for Sanctions Against Israel
(paperback, 2012, Verso Books): Twenty essays here, including Omar
Barghouti, Naomi Klein, Ilan Pappe, Joel Beinin, John Berger, Neve
Gordon. Sanctions are a relatively non-belligerent way of expressing
concern over Israel's manifest unwillingness either to free occupied
Palestinians or to treat them equitably. Sanctions helped to tip the
balance in South Africa to end the apartheid regime. At some point I
fear they will be necessary to make any degree of progress toward
peace and justice in Israel-Palestine. Also see: Omar Barghouti:
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions: The Global Struggle for Palestinian
Rights (paperback, 2011, Haymarket Books).

William Marsden: Fools Rule: Inside the Failed Politics
of Climate Change (2011, Knopf Canada; paperback, 2012,
Vintage Canada): Canadian journalist, so good chance this focuses
more on Canadian politics than on riper targets in the US, not
that the anti-science opposition in both countries isn't driven
by the same oil and coal companies. Author previously wrote a
book on oil shale: Stupid to the Last Drop: How Alberta Is
Bringing Environmental Armageddon to Canada (and Doesn't Seem
to Care).

GJ Meyer: The Borgias: The Hidden History (2013,
Bantam): Of interest mostly, I suspect, if you've followed Neil
Jordan's TV series and want to fill in some details, although it
looks like this book takes some unexpected turns. Also available,
and perhaps more conventional: Christopher Hibbert: The Borgias
and Their Enemies: 1431-1919 (2008; paperback, 2009, Mariner
Books).

Loretta Napoleoni: Maonomics: Why Chinese Communists Make
Better Capitalists Than We Do (2011; paperback, 2012, Seven
Stories Press): Previously wrote Rogue Economics: Capitalism's
New Reality (2008), and ups the snark quotient here. Certainly
is the case that China's economic growth has outpaced ever corner
of the capitalist world for at least the last decade.

Mark Owen/Kevin Maurer: No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of
the Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden (2012, Dutton): Also
subtitled, The Autobiography of a Navy Seal. Second guy up the
stairs. First guy to cash in. Isn't that -- making a killing out of a
killing -- what America is really all about?

Joel Salatin: Folks, This Ain't Normal: A Farmer's Advice
for Happier Hens, Healthier People, and a Better World (2011;
paperback, 2012, Center Street): The Virginia farmer who loomed so
large in Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma speaks for
himself -- not for the first time, either: previous books include:
You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in
a Farming Enterprise (paperback, 1998, Polyface); Holy Cows
& Hog Heaven: The Food Buyer's Guide to Farm Friendly Food
(paperback, 2005, Polyface); Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal:
War Stories From the Local Food Front (paperback, 2007, Polyface);
The Sheer Ecstasy of Being a Lunatic Farmer (paperback, 2010,
Polyface).

Josh Schonwald: The Taste of Tomorrow: Dispatches From the
Future of Food (2012, Harper Collins): Enthusiastic survey
of speculations about how food will be engineered and manufactured
in 2035.

James Gustave Speth: America the Possible: Manifesto for
a New Economy (2012, Yale University Press): Environmentalist,
previously wrote The Bridge at the Edge of the World, which
questions growth for growth's sake. Should expand on that here.

John Swenson: New Atlantis: Musicians Battle for the Survival
of New Orleans (2011; paperback, 2012, Oxford University Press):
A rock critic of my generation goes to post-Katrina New Orleans and
finds inspiration in the music -- where else would one work?

Bob Woodward: The Price of Politics (2012, Simon &
Schuster): Another inside-out first draft of history, his second on
Obama after four volumes on Bush, the first extolling his genius for
leadership and the last wondering where all that went. Focuses on
the budget battle with congressional Republicans, not anyone's best
hour. New Yorker review: "Woodward, who has here the elements
of a devastating study of Washingtonian pettiness, has instead
written a book that in many ways exemplifies it."

Luigi Zingales: A Capitalism for the People: Recapturing the
Lost Genius of American Prosperity (2012, Basic Books): Chicago
economist, argues that American capitalism is dying as the market gets
ever more regulated not just by "anti-market pitchfork populism" but
by crony corruption he associates with "Europe and much of the rest of
the world." Quick fix: trust the markets.

Saturday, March 23. 2013

In my books research, I came across a new anti-Obama hate book,
David Harsanyi's Obama's Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed
by Obama's Reelection (2013, Regnery). The book description (at
Amazon) reads:

Conquest, Famine, War, Death -- the four horsemen are coming, in
the form of the national debt, widespread dependence on government,
turmoil in the Middle East, and the expansion of the bureaucratic
state. . . .

Under Obama, America has become a land of more dependence, more
hand-outs, more federal programs, and more government agencies. The
great danger is that Americans have gotten used to it. Many people
today expect, as a matter of fact, that the government will hand them
health insurance, student loans, birth control, and anything else they
might need or desire -- while they are increasingly numb to the
pernicious creep of the bureaucratic state and the alarming escalation
of unsustainable spending and debt.

Meanwhile, powerful forces abroad seek to destroy American and
Western culture while Obama has sat on his thumbs and looked the other
way, tossing out politically correct platitudes when asked about his
response to their open threats and aggression.

I don't really feel like arguing these points, even though they are
pretty severely disconnected from reality. The national debt, for example,
is a problem -- and even then not much of one -- only if its growth isn't
matched by growth of the economy, so attempts to "solve the debt crisis"
by austerity, forcibly slowing down the economy, are counterproductive
and irresponsible. One worries here that Obama and the Democrats, having
bought into long-term national debt problem, will shy away from policies
that would actually provide the necessary growth.

As for all those "takers" -- you know, the 47% who pay no income tax
but live high on government hog -- that shouldn't be something one can
argue about. If all those people consciously depend so much on government
largesse, they should be aware enough to vote to protect their interest,
since their votes and the national conscience are the only things that
keep the dole coming. But do they vote? Most don't: because they aren't
all that impressed by the federal bounty and/or because they regard the
politicians of both parties are crooked.

The Inside Flap explains the four horsemen somewhat differently, with
debt and dependency followed by "surrender" -- "the Obama administration
kowtows to dictators, apologizes to those who hate us, refuses to defend
American ideals, and is actively working to undo our superpower status" --
and "death" -- abortion, of course, which under Obama "is a positive good,
to be subsidized and even exported at taxpayer expense." One only wishes,
but that's another story.

As I've explained before, the whole mantra that "Obama hates America"
is ridiculous from the start. America elected Obama president, twice, by
substantial margins. How could someone with the ego to run for president
have so little self-regard to hate a country that honors him so? You
have to wonder if the real enemies of the real America -- the one that
twice voted Obama president -- aren't the ones who hate Obama, and who
have graduated from hating the leader to loathing all who voted for him.
The right-wing may still love their idea of America -- it's just the
folks who live and work here they can't stand.

Consider this: one of Amazon's reviewers quotes the book (p. 54):

Big government makes us poorer; it does so by making us less
moral. It undermines our work ethic; it rewards irresponsibility
(through everything from mortgage bailouts to subsidized
contraception); it promotes envy and greed; it creates enemy classes
or groups (like the wealthy) and encourages us all to demonize them
and take from them.

Aside from the nonsensical evidence -- those mortgage bailouts
never happened (unless, of course, you owned a bank), and "subsidized
contraception" is a cost-savings measure for the still private health
insurance racket; what's subsidized is health insurance for people
who can't afford it, which is equally a subsidy for the whole health
care industry -- the striking thing here is the complete inversion of
common sense.

Harsanyi seems to believe that there is a state of nature without
government where "we" are richer and more moral (ignoring the fact
that much of western culture has been very suspicious of the morality
of the rich). Let's be generous and call this state Eden, inasmuch
as he seems to view government as Original Sin. Needless to say, his
view is at odds with the traditional conservative position, which is
that we need the state, both with its monopoly of force within the
army and police and with its administrative bureaucracy, in order to
force the masses to be more moral, to support the established social
order, and to make (at least the leaders of that order) richer.

As for his fear of robbing the rich for the benefit of the poor,
that classic trope (at least as "Robin Hood") dates back to the Middle
Ages, way before liberalism and the modern bureaucratic state -- but
alas not before the rich learned how to use state force and laws to
exploit the poor. Throughout history, it's been the downtrodden, the
poor, and those who imagined a more equitable order, who had most
reason to fear the state. Only with the invention of democracy did
it become possible for the masses to imagine using nonviolent votes
to get a fairer shake. What Harsanyi and his ilk fear is that too
many people -- especially young people -- have discovered how to do
just that.

So they rail against the people's choice, damning all government,
decrying any hint of redistributing the nation's wealth, declaring
the very thought to be immoral, and damning those who dare think it
to their long-winded, deeply paranoid wrath. In effect, what they
are saying is that the people made the wrong choice, so to hell with
the people. They're admitting that democracy worked against them, so
they aim to subvert democracy. (Examples abound, from voter ID laws
to unlimited campaign spending to Scalia's campaign to void civil
rights law.) And most ominously, they insist on taking absolutist
positions: their opposition to abortion becomes a defense of rapists,
their absolute defense of gun rights becomes cover for criminals and
license for crackpots, their "line in the sand" on taxes bankrupts
the country and denies even themselves real services of government.
They're nuts, divorced from reality, estranged from their neighbors,
and spiteful, willing to cut off their own legs to make sure you
immoral sluts can't catch a break.

A couple years ago John Amato and David Neiwert wrote a short book:
Over the Cliff: How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane
(paperback, 2010, Polipoint Press). They barely scratched the surface,
and never quite got to the heart of the problem. That seems to be here,
in Harsanyi's delusions.

Saturday, March 16. 2013

This is the second collection of forty of my little book blurbs
in several days. Scratch file currently has 84 more, so I could
very well dump two more of these next week. Not as important as
the ones in Thursday's post -- in particular, no books that I've
already managed to read -- but still noteworthy.

Anat Admati/Martin Hellwig: The Bankers' New Clothes: What's
Wrong With Banking and What to Do About It (2013, Princeton
University Press): Presumably covers Dodd-Frank and still finds it
wanting, which seems right. I'm inclined to go back to the "banking
is boring" days, but I doubt if they go that far.

Eric Alterman/Kevin Mattson: The Cause: The Fight for
American Liberalism From Franklin Roosevelt to Barack Obama
(2012, Viking): One of the few political writers who remains an
unapologetic, unreconstructed, proud liberal -- cf. his 2009
book, Why We're Liberals: A Handbook for Restoring America's
Most Important Ideals. One problem is that so many of his
exemplars, not least the current president but also his first,
have a checkered history, sometimes a mix of illiberal beliefs,
sometimes just a willingness to chuck principle for political
opportunism.

Ariella Azoulay: From Palestine to Israel: A Photographic
Record of Destruction and State Formation, 1947-1950 (paperback,
2011, Pluto Press): On 200 photographs from the war when Israel not
only achieved independence but reduced the Arab population of the
nation from 70% to 15%. She also wrote The Civil Contract of
Photography (2012, Zone Books) and Civil Imagination: A
Political Ontology of Photography (2012, Verso).

Max Boot: Invisible Armies: An Epic History of Guerrilla
Warfare From Ancient Times to the Present (2013, Liveright):
Notorious war lover, back to his favorite subject. But while The
Savage Wars of Peace: Small Wars and the Rise of American Power
(2002) was written to advance an argument -- that the US shouldn't
think twice about getting into small wars because they always work
out just fine -- it's not clear what the point is here (indeed,
Boot's traditional fans tend to be on the COIN side (but not always,
and results there haven't been so cheery).

Angus Burgin: The Great Persuasion: Reinventing Free Markets
Since the Depression (2012, Harvard University Press): On
economic theory, so markets are not so much reinvented -- they had
never been banned -- as reideologized by various economists, from
FA Hayek to Milton Friedman, especially through the Mont Pélerin
Society.

John Burt: Lincoln's Tragic Pragmatism: Lincoln, Douglas, and
Moral Conflict (2012, Belknap Press): Big book (832 pp.) to
just cover the Lincoln-Douglas debates of 1858, compared favorably to
Harry Jaffa's Crisis of the House Divided (1959), long regarded
as the standard work on the subject.

Jeff Connaughton: The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always
Wins (2012, Prospecta): Ever wonder why banks are too
big to fail? Why they're too influential even to be reorganized
under bankruptcy law when they're tottering? What about why
Jamie Dimon still has his job? One big part is their lobby,
which is the author's main target here. Another is the incest
which has allowed them to capture the Treasury Dept., the SEC,
other regulatory agencies, and most importantly the Fed. Of
course they win. They personify the greed Washington aspires
to.

Fawaz A Gerges: Obama and the Middle East: The End of
America's Moment? (2012, Palgrave Macmillan): Moment to
do what? The US hasn't had a moment to do anything constructive
in the Middle East since 1991, when defeating Saddam Hussein
led to the Madrid talks on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
but even then Bush was too hamstrung by the Saudis on one side
and the Israelis on the other, with festering wounds in Iraq
and Iran unsettled. Obama made some concessions to Arab Spring,
but ultimately couldn't support it, because the goal there would
not just be to make the Arab world more democratic and prosperous
but also more independent of the US.

Al Gore: The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change
(2013, Random House): Smarter than he ever let on as a politician,
but still . . . The six, more or less: "ever-increasing economic
globalization" ("Earth Inc."); "worldwide digital communications"
("the Global Mind"); "the balance of power is shifting from a
US-centered system to one with multiple emerging centers of power";
"unsustainable growth in consumption, pollution flows, and depletion
of strategic resources"; "sciences revolutions are putting control
of evolution in human hands"; "a radical disruption of the relationship
between human beings and the earth's ecosystems, along with the
beginning of a revolutionary transformation of energy systems,
agriculture, transportation, and construction worldwide" -- no
idea what that last one means, either.

Amy S Greenberg: A Wicked War: Polk, Clay, Lincoln, and
the 1846 US Invasion of Mexico (2012, Knopf): Certainly a
war of naked aggression by the US, aimed at removing Mexico if
not yet the more numerous native population from the slice of
North America from Texas west to California. Polk was president
and orchestrated it. Clay was his most prominent Whig opponent,
and Lincoln was a virtual unknown, but not for long.

David Harsanyi: Obama's Four Horsemen: The Disasters Unleashed
by Obama's Reelection (2013, Regnery): The paranoid hate lit
moves into its post-apocalyptic phase, oblivious to the fact that not
much happened under Obama's first term and that even less is likely
under the second. The "four horsemen" are "national debt, widespread
dependence on government, turmoil in the Middle East, and expansion
of the bureaucratic state" -- makes me think of GW Bush, but, well,
you know. Also competing for the paranoid bigot's dollars: John R
Lott Jr: At the Brink: Will Obama Push Us Over the Edge?
(2013, Regnery); Wayne Allyn Root: The Ultimate Obama Survival
Guide: Secrets to Protecting Your Family, Your Finances, and Your
Freedom (2013, Regnery); Ken Cuccinelli: The Last Line of
Defense: The New Fight for American Liberty (2013, Crown).

Dilip Hiro: Inside Central Asia: A Political and Cultural
History of Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan,
Tadjikistan, Turkey and Iran (2009; paperback, 2011, Overlook):
Author of the encyclopedic The Essential Middle East: A Comprehensive
Guide (2nd ed, paperback, 2003, Carroll & Graf), various books
on Iran, Iraq, and oil, provides an overview to the ex-Soviet "-stans,"
which in addition to their continuing Russian (and Chinese) interests
are also affected by Turkey and Iran. And yes, there's oil there, also
Islamist militants, corrupt leaders, etc., everything you need for
another round of "great games." Also available: Ahmed Rashid: Jihad:
The Rise of Militant Islam in Central Asia (2002, paperback, Penguin
Books); Olivier Roy: The New Central Asia: The Creation of Nations
(updated ed, paperback, 2007, NYU Press).

Michael Hudson: The Bubble and Beyond: Fictitious Capital,
Debt Deflation and Global Crisis (paperback, 2012, Islet):
Economist, has a bunch of books but is perhaps best known for his
2006 essay predicting "the coming real estate collapse." He has
ahead of the curve back then, and likely still is.

Louis Hyman: Debtor Nation: The History of America in Red
Ink (2011; paperback, 2012, Princeton University Press):
On the expansion of consumer credit in America. Also has another
book, Borrow: The American Way of Debt (paperback, 2012,
Vintage), which appears to cover the same ground. Don't know what
his angle is, but one way to think of the expansion of consumer
debt is as an ersatz wage substitute: it allows people to buy
more without being worth more. As median incomes have stagnated
over the last 30 years, consumer debt allowed the illusion that
the wage progress of previous generations has continued. As that
seems unlikely to be sustainable, one would expect some sort of
crisis to follow.

Susan Jacoby: The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and
American Freethought (2012, Yale University Press): A
prominent anti-religious speaker from the golden age of Jacoby's
previous Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism.

Robert D Kaplan: The Revenge of Geography: What the Map
Tells Us About Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate
(2012, Random House): Good writer, interesting journalist, someone
who tries to think deep and invariably fails, mostly because his
mind is locked in ancient struggles for domination. How confused
can he get? Try this: "Afghanistan's porous borders will keep it
the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for
Pakistan, India's main enemy." That hasn't been true since Babur:
the Brits came in boats, the Americans wired in dollars, Pakistan
(for better or, mostly, worse) has a direct border, and Afghanistan
doesn't.

Matt Kennard: Irregular Army: How the US Military Recruited
Neo-Nazis, Gang Members, and Criminals to Fight the War on Terror
(2012, Verso): Hard to tell how big a problem this is, given that no
respectable US reporter would make a point of describing US soldiers
as psychos, although you do have all those suicides, the occasional
mass shooter, and it doesn't stretch the imagination much to wonder
how many militia nuts got their basic training in overkill at public
expense.

Daniel Klaidman: Kill or Capture: The War on Terror
and the Soul of the Obama Presidency (2012, Houghton
Mifflin): A look at the politics behind Obama's retreat from
his initial promises to close Guantanamo and prosecute terror
suspects in the legal system, his use of drones to assassinate
supposed enemies, leading up to the preference for killing
over capturing Bin Laden.

Timothy W Luke/Ben Agger, eds: A Journal of No Illusions:
Telos, Paul Piccone, and the Americanization of Critical Theory
(paperback, 2011, Telos Press): I knew Piccone very well, joining
him (and Telos) when he moved from Buffalo to St. Louis,
and he had a deep impact on my thinking, mostly forcing me to be
more critical of everything, not least of him and his volcanic
eruptions of deep thoughts and profanity. A dozen essays, Russell
Jacoby and Robert D'Amico the only names familiar from my days,
figure this to be the authorized story. Also: Confronting the
Crisis: Writings of Paul Piccone (2008, Telos Press), which
at 396 pp. is probably far short of his collected works, but I
always wondered why such a know-it-all never bothered to pull it
all together into a signature book.

Edward N Luttwak: The Rise of China vs. the Logic of Strategy
(2012, Belknap Press): Security strategist, best known for writing the
manual on how to stage a Coup D'Etat, engages in the favorite
parlor game of US security strategists: imagining China's out to top
the US as the world's most bloated military power. Needless to say, he
focuses much on Sun Tsu.

Greg Muttitt: Fuel on the Fire: Oil and Politics in
Occupied Iraq (2012, Free Press): The invasion and
occupation of Iraq may or may not have been about oil -- like
many things, depends on who you ask, and how candid they are --
but the oil is there, and the demand to book it, produce it,
and market it is here. We know, for instance, from Steve Coll's
Private Empire, that Exxon expected it would take ten
years before they could move in and book oil properties, and
that has proven about right, and that's just one example of
what should be many.

Ralph Nader: The Seventeen Solutions: Bold Ideas for Our
American Future (paperback, 2012, Harper): Laundry list
includes: reforming the tax system, making out communities more
self-reliant, reclaiming science and technology for the people,
protecting the family, getting corporations off welfare, creating
national charters for corporations, reducing our bloated military
budget, organizing congressional watchdog groups, enlisting the
enlightened super-rich. I think I could do better than that, but
probably wouldn't have thought of that last one. Previously wrote
The Seventeen Traditions (2007), so has something about
that number.

Greg Palast: Billionaires & Ballot Bandits: How to
Steal an Election in 9 Easy Steps (paperback, 2012, Seven
Stories Press): Leftist journalist/pundit, someone I've never
bothered with because his past books -- The Best Democracy
Money Can Buy, Armed Madhouse, Vultures' Picnic --
seemed to offer a slightly sensationalized gloss on the obvious,
but this year's election pretty much comes down to his targets:
unlimited campaign spending and the efforts to suppress the vote
as much as possible.

Kevin Phillips: 1775: A Good Year for Revolution
(2012, Viking): Returning to his theses originally outlined in
The Cousins' Wars (1999) -- before he spent his last few
books dissecting the catastrophe the Bush family brought to
America -- this focuses more narrowly on the first year of the
American Revolution.

Lawrence N Powell: The Accidental City: Improvising New
Orleans (2012, Harvard University Press): A history of the
Crescent City, especially its first century-plus, up to statehood
in 1812. During that time it passed from France to Spain to the
US, engaged in slavery and commerce, perched on some of the most
marginal land in the country. The latter is also the subject of
Richard Campanella: Bienville's Dilemma: A Historical Geography
of New Orleans (paperback, 2008, University of Louisiana Press).

David Quammen: Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next
Human Pandemic (2012, WW Norton): Natural science writer,
has written a couple essential books (e.g., The Song of the
Dodo: Island Biogeography in an Age of Extinction). Bacterial
and viral infectious don't just appear. They evolve within host
species, and occasionally jump to other species, sometimes with
deadly consequences. This is likely to be the book that finally
makes all that make sense.

Robert B Reich: Beyond Outrage: What Has Gone Wrong With
Our Economy and Our Democracy, and How to Fix It (paperback,
2012, Vintage): Cover says "Expanded Edition" but I'm not sure to
what. Three essays: one on how the "game" has been rigged, one on
"The Rise of the Regressive Right," a third on "What You Need to
Do." Pretty basic stuff: Reich is becoming more focused as the
obvious problems keep boxing him in ever tighter.

Carne Ross: The Leaderless Revolution: How Ordinary
People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century
(2012, Blue Rider Press): Well, that sounds pretty optimistic. Ross
was a British diplomat, envoy to the UN, worked to mediate crises
in the Balkans and the Middle East, previously wrote Independent
Diplomat: Dispatches From an Unaccountable Elite (2007, Cornell
University Press).

David E Sanger: Confront and Conceal: Obama's Secret Wars
and Surprising Use of American Power (2012, Crown): As
Obama was taking office in 2009, Sanger threw down a challenge
in the form of a book, The Inheritance: The World Obama Confronts
and the Challenges to American Power. An unabashed, unrepentant
fan of American power, Sanger was worried that Bush's ineptness had
squandered and poisoned it, so now he's delighted that competency
has been restored, and the nation is bigger and bullier than ever.
I'm afraid I'm less pleased by all this: I've long said that things
not worth doing are not worth doing well, and this is one of them.
(The drug war, which many people think Obama realizes is a crock,
is another of them.)

Landon RY Storrs: The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of
the New Deal Left (2013, Princeton University Press): The
McCarthy period, like the original 1919 "red scare" a piece of
postwar nostalgia aimed at preserving the nation's martial spirit
by starting another war, and ultimately a far worse one in that
it succeeded in not only establishing the nation's cold war stance
but in purging the post-New Deal government of its leftist rank
and file. The effect was not only to militate the nation against
the Soviet Union but to turn the US against the working class
everywhere, including in the US.

William J Stuntz: The Collapse of American Criminal
Justice (2011, Harvard University Press): Famous legal
scholar, died shortly before this was released, offering a
broad rethinking of the entire criminal justice system as it
exists in the US. Much reviewed and commented upon, some things
that make sense to me and some that don't.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: Antifragile: Things That Gain
From Disorder (2012, Random House): Author's day job is
Professor of Risk Engineering, but he has built a reputation in
mathematics and economics by writing books that cut against the
grain of expectations (e.g., The Black Swan, Fooled
by Randomness). This looks like another.

Göran Therborn: The World: A Beginner's Guide
(paperback, 2011, Polity): Swedish sociologist, one of the New
Left Review Marxists, offers a short primer on everything.

Evan Thomas: Ike's Bluff: President Eisenhower's Secret
Battle to Save the World (2012, Little Brown): Portrait of
the president as a sly peacemaker, which is a bit of a stretch,
but as Thomas points out, when Eisenhower took office many top
military strategists were advocating a first strike against the
Soviet Union, China too, and use of nuclear bombs in the still
hot but stalemated Korea War. He's onto something there, but I
wouldn't push it too far, given what the CIA did during those
years (Iran, Guatemala, Cuba, the U-2 incident), and given what
a rabid hawk Eisenhower turned into when advising Johnson on
Vietnam. Previously wrote The War Lovers, about 1898.

Jeffrey Toobin: The Oath: The Obama White House and the
Supreme Court (2012, Doubleday): Journalist, specialist in
the Supreme Court -- previously wrote: The Nine: Inside the
Secret World of the Supreme Court -- a subject of perpetual
interest given how the right has taken over and radicalized the
Court.

Nick Turse: The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones,
Spies, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare (paperback,
Haymarket, 2012): Short (107 pp) essay on the latest changes in US tactics,
which keep the old imperial interface intact while reducing exposure and
public consciousness of what the military is up to.

Craig Unger: Boss Rove: Inside Karl Rove's Secret Kingdom
of Power (2012, Scribner): Author has written a couple books
on Bush, the first on his Saudi connections, the second on the Iraq
war and other misdeeds, so he's been turning over rocks to see what
he might find, and finally he's discovered Turd Blossom. Rove has
spent his post-Bush days building a modern political machine, which
is to say money laundering and propagandizing. Not clear to me that
he's had a whole lot of success, but that's mostly because the
crazies have out-crazied him. But he'll be back, not least because
no one's more opportunist, nor corrupt.

Mark K Updegrove: Indomitable Will: LBJ in the Presidency
(2012, Crown): I reckon one reason Johnson's legislative record seems
more impressive these days is that Obama's seems so thin.

Craig Whitney: Living With Guns: A Liberal's Case for the
Second Amendment (2012, Public Affairs): Rationalization
for accepting a compromise with the gun industry in America, not
that any are forthcoming. Like many on the left, I decided that
this wasn't an issue worth the political fight: one better step
would be to disengage from war and reduce the military, another
would be economic justice (equalizing incomes and putting a floor
under the impoverished areas), another would be to reduce crime
by ending drug prohibition, another would be more realistic study
and public information of the risks and benefits to gun ownership.
This book may be useful, especially for historical background and
insight into the constitutional issue. Related books: Adam Winkler:
Gun Fight: The Battle Over the Right to Bear Arms in America
(2011, WW Norton); Mark V Tushnet: Out of Range: Why the Constitution
Can't End the Battle Over Guns (2007, Oxford University Press);
Brian Doherty: Gun Control on Trial: Inside the Supreme Court
Battle Over the Second Amendment (2009, Cato Institute); Saul
Cornell: A Well Regulated Militia: The Founding Fathers and the
Origins of Gun Control in America (paperback, 2008, Oxford
University Press); Stephen P Halbrook: The Founders' Second
Amendment: Origins of the Right to Bear Arms (2012, Ivan R Dee);
David Hemenway: Private Guns, Public Health (2004; paperback,
2006, University of Michigan Press); Robert J Spitzer: The Politics
of Gun Control (5th ed, paperback, Paradigm). Of course, lots
of books by John R Lott Jr, too (e.g., More Guns, Less Crime:
Understanding Crime and Gun Control Laws).

Richard Wolff: Democracy at Work: A Cure for Capitalism
(paperback, 2012, Haymarket Books): Marxist economist, his previous
book about the 2008 meltdown was titled, Capitalism Hits the Fan,
so he's not afraid to use the C-word derogatorily. As for that D-word,
for over 200 years now the right has fretted that common folk would
use their votes in support of their own interests.

Thursday, March 14. 2013

Again, way too long since the last 40-deep book prospecting post --
September 27 -- possibly because over the last couple months this
has degenerated into a music blog (and a grumpy one at that). I'll
try to catch up here in a hurry. Since I only do 40 books at a time,
I should run about four of these in rapid succession. For the first
helping, I've cherry picked the most important books in history,
politics, and economics. I'll hold up on doing paperback reissues
until I get that section sorted better.

Some of this stuff is so old I've managed to get it through my
reading list, hence the illustrations. Chandrasekaran I even have
notes on. Most likely the notes were written before I read the books --
Azoulay is the exception, and I added a line on Economix. The
Avi Raz and Daniel Kurtzer books are in the queue.

Elliott Abrams: Tested by Zion: The Bush Administration and
the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict (2013, Cambridge University
Press): A self-serving memoir in the manner of Dennis Ross and so
many other failures, but Abrams didn't fail -- he was pure evil,
and was remarkably successful not just at wrecking any prospects
for peace in Israel's neighborhood but in making everyone involved,
including the US, much meaner and crazier. No idea how much of this
he admits to -- such creatures usually prefer to dwell in the dark.

Stanley Aronowitz: Taking It Big: C Wright Mills and the
Making of Political Intellectuals (2012, Columbia University
Press): Mills was the most influential sociologist of his generation,
at least on left-oriented students of my generation, so Aronowitz is
well positioned to look both at what Mills did and what we made of
him.

Ariella Azoulay/Adi Ophir: The One-State Condition: Occupation
and Democracy in Israel/Palestine (paperback, 2012, Stanford
University Press): Abridged from a much larger book in Hebrew, this
is a theory-heavy structural analysis of Israel's occupation -- how
various legal and military regimes have been evolved to repress revolt
and manage the Palestinian population both within the Green Zone and
in the occupied territories. They make no bones that the key is violence,
sometimes naked (their term is "eruptive"), more often implicit (what
they call "withheld"). Moreover, this violence is so much a part of
Israeli rule that the only way to make peace is to replace the Israeli
regime.

Bernard Bailyn: The Barbarous Years: The Peopling of British
North America: The Conflict of Civilizations, 1600-1675 (2012,
Knopf): Should as much be the story of the de-peopling of North America,
as the native population died off while surrendering land to European
(and African) newcomers. Especially in the early years, the population
balance was treacherous.

Sheila Bair: Bull by the Horns: Fighting to Save Main
Street From Wall Street and Wall Street From Itself
(2012, Free Press): A Kansas Republican, appointed by Bush to
head the FDIC in 2006, Bair distinguished herself as damn near
the only government official who attempted to do something about
the financial collapse before the bottom fell out.

Antony Beevor: The Second World War: The Definitive
History (2012, Little Brown): Big book (880 pp.), but
the subject has been so exhaustively explored that this promises
to be a primer, a reduction to bare essentials, which probably
means one battle after another. Beevor himself has written whole
(and pretty large) books on Stalingrad, D-Day, and
The Fall of Berlin 1945, as well as his other "definitive"
The Battle for Spain: The Spanish Civil War 1936-1939.

Peter L Bergen: Manhunt: The Ten-Year Search for Bin Laden:
From 9/11 to Abbottabad (2012, Crown): Author interviewed Bin
Laden back when he was nobody, and managed to ply that association
into a lengthy career -- Holy War, Inc.: Inside the Secret World of
Osama Bin Laden (2001); The Osama bin Laden I Know (2006),
The Longest War: The Enduring Conflict Between America and
al-Qaeda (2011) -- so this book was pretty much inevitable. Also
inevitable was the deluge, some specific to Bin Laden, some more
general: Mark Bowden: The Finish: The Killing of Osama Bin
Laden; Mark Owen: No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the
Mission That Killed Osama Bin Laden; Aki Peritz/Eric Rosenbach:
Find, Fix, Finish: Inside the Counterterrorism Campaigns That
Killed Bin Laden and Devastated Al Qaeda; Chuck Pfarrer: SEAL
Target Geronomo: The Inside Story of the Mission to Kill Osama Bin
Laden; Eric Schmitt/Thom Shanker: Counterstrike: The Untold
Story of America's Secret Campaign Against Al Qaeda.

Alan S Blinder: After the Music Stopped: The Financial
Crisis, the Response, and the Work Ahead (2013, Penguin
Press): Clinton economist, spent some time (1994-96) as vice chair
of the Fed, reviews the 2008 meltdown and the various steps the
Fed and Treasury took to save the big banks. He defends those
unprecedented steps, but also finds need for further reform.

Naomi Cahn/June Carbone: Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal
Polarization and the Creation of Culture (2010; paperback,
Oxford University Press, 2011): A look at how American families have
been polarized by the red-blue culture divide.

Rajiv Chandrasekaran: Little America: The War Within the
War for Afghanistan (2012, Knopf): Mild-mannered journalist,
laid back then wrote a damning chronicle of US incompetence in Iraq,
Imperial Life in the Emerald City: Inside Iraq's Green Zone,
moves on to Afghanistan. There, he focuses on Helmand, home of
America's prewar "Little America" hydro-project, watching wave
after wave of American power unable to do anything constructive.
[link].

Joseph Crespino: Strom Thurmond's America (2012,
Hill & Wang): The Dixiecrat's presidential candidate lived a
full 100 years, and did something unspeakably vile in nearly every
one of them. He was the first southern Democrat to switch parties,
starting a trend that brought the GOP the likes of Jesse Helms,
Trent Lott, Richard Shelby, and Phil Gramm.

Michael Dobbs: Six Months in 1945: FDR, Stalin, Churchill,
and Truman, From World War to Cold War (2012, Knopf): The
death of Franklin Roosevelt and the succession of Harry Truman was
probably the key event in turning the US-Soviet alliance sour, even
if most Cold War histories push the dates out a bit, all the easier
to blame the Soviets. Trying to cram this transformation into the
last six months of WWII -- from Yalta to Hiroshima, which as Gar
Alperowitz argued was a diplomatic gesture aimed as much as Moscow
as at Tokyo -- forces the issue, but I'm not sure it doesn't fit.

Robert Draper: Do Not Ask What Good We Do: Inside the US
House of Representatives (2012, Free Press): Previously
wrote Dead Certain: The Presidency of George W. Bush (2007),
one of the better books on that sorry subject. This goes deep inside
the 112th House, which the Republicans took over following the 2010
elections. At this point I'd say wait for the paperback, out in May
hopefully with some extras, also with a new title: When the Tea
Party Came to Town: Inside the US House of Representatives' Most
Combative, Dysfunctional, and Infuriating Term in Modern History
(paperback, 2013, Simon & Schuster) -- not that the 113th won't
give it a run for the money.

Jesse Ferris: Nasser's Gamble: How Intervention in Yemen
Caused the Six-Day War and the Decline of Egyptian Power
(2012, Princeton University Press): Nasser referred to his five-year
intervention in Yemen as "my Vietnam": no doubt it both weakened
and unfocused Egypt's military, which only added to the confidence
Israel's generals felt in launching their 1967 blitzkrieg. Still,
while everyone acknowledges that it aided Israel's win, it is rare
to see anyone argue that it caused Israel's aggression, not least
because it calls into question Nasser's motives and priorities.

Michael Goodwin/Dan E Burr: Economix: How and Why Our
Economy Works (and Doesn't Work), in Words and Pictures
(paperback, 2012, Abrams Comic Arts): Comix-style, more history
than theory, which probably helps both the illustrator and the
reader. For many years Larry Gonick had a corner on scholarly
(or at least nerdy) comix, but others are appearing: aside from
this one on, Yoram Bauman and Grady Klein have two volumes of
The Cartoon Introduction to Economics, one micro, the
other macro. I've just finished reading this one, and it is a
remarkably concise primer on nearly everything you need to know
about politics and the economy since Adam Smith (plus it's a
big help on Smith).

Michael R Gordon/General Bernard E Trainor: Endgame: The
Inside Story of the Struggle for Iraq From George W Bush to Barack
Obama (2012, Pantheon; paperback, 2013, Vintage): Authors
of Cobra II: The Inside Story of the Invasion and Occupation of
Iraq, back when they were embedded in high command, their
typical viewpoint for all things military. Once again, they claim
the inside story, backed by "still-classified documents" their
sources don't trust to the public.

Michael Grunwald: The New New Deal: The Hidden Story of
Change in the Obama Era (2012, Simon & Schuster):
Mostly on Obama's stimulus bill, now widely understood to have
been way too small, not to mention oversold. Not sure what more
has been hidden about the story, other than Obama's penchant
for negotiating himself down while imagining that he's working
up a bipartisan deal. There were no meaningful bipartisan deals
during his watch -- only more or less egregious capitulations,
which showed how little he was willing to stand up for the very
people who elected him, even so much as speaking out in defense
of their (and supposedly his) principles. Grunwald previously
wrote The Swamp: The Everglades, Florida, and the Politics
of Paradise (paperback, 2007, Simon & Schuster), which
I bought long ago but never got around to reading.

James Inhofe: The Greatest Hoax: How the Global Warming
Conspiracy Threatens Your Future (2012, WND Books): Cover
introduces Inhofe as "US Senator"; actually he's just a Republican
from Oklahoma, but since the opposition to the science of climate
change is overwhelmingly political, why not let a real politician (as
opposed to a hack like Roy Spencer) do the talking: "Americans are
over-regulated and over-taxed. When regulation escalates, the result
is an increase in regulators. In other words, bigger government is
required to enforce the greater degree of regulation. Bigger
government means bigger budgets and higher taxes. 'More' simply
doesn't mean 'better.' A perfect example is the entire global warming,
climate-change issue, which is an effort to dramatically and hugely
increase regulation of each of our lives and business, and to raise
our cost of living and taxes." Nothing here about whether the science
is true. Nothing about future effects. Nothing about whether it can be
mitigated or controlled. The whole case for opposition is that it runs
against Inhofe's political agenda, which is itself nonsense. There are
many other books that oppose the supposed political agenda riding on
top of climate science, and even a few that try to "debunk" that
science. I published a long list in 2010; some more recent ones
include: Larry Bell: Climate of Corruption: Politics and Power
Behind the Global Warming Hoax (2011, Greenleaf); Patrick J
Michaels: Climate Coup: Global Warming's Invasion of Our Government
and Our Lives (2011, Cato Institute); Brian Sussman:
Eco-Tyranny: How the Left's Green Agenda Will Dismantle America
(2012, WND Books); Robert Zubrin: Merchants of Despair: Radical
Environmentalists, Criminal Pseudo-Scientists, and the Fatal Cult of
Antihumanism (2012, Encounter Books).

Robert Kagan: The World America Made (2012, Knopf):
A right-wing view of America as the world's indispensible nation,
without which the whole world declines into war and chaos -- as
opposed, I suppose, to the universe where the US causes all that
war and chaos, i.e., the one we live in today.

Fred Kaplan: The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot
to Change the American Way of War (2013, Simon & Schuster):
Kaplan wrote an important book a few years back on the "revolution in
military affairs" which was put to the test when Bush invaded Iraq --
Daydream Believers: How a Few Grand Ideas Wrecked American Power --
so he should be fairly critical at reporting the military's latest
theoretical hubris, COIN (counterinsurgency theory and practice).
Petraeus was the marquis star of COIN: he wrote the book, which got
him back in the game, not that he ever practiced what he preached.
The guy suckered into that was Gen. Stanley McChrystal, whose memoir
is also newly available (My Share of the Task: A Memoir). No
word from Petraeus yet, but Paula Broadwell: All In: The Education
of General David Petraeus turns out to be more authorized than
was initially imagined.

Ira Katznelson: Fear Itself: The New Deal and the Origins of
Our Time (2013, Liveright): A substantial history of the New
Deal. Previously wrote When Affirmative Action Was White,
which showed how the New Deal shortchanged blacks, so I don't expect
him to pull his punches on race.

Ian Kershaw: The End: The Defiance and Destruction of
Hitler's Germany, 1944-1945 (2011, Penguin Books): He's
written a lot of books about the Third Reich -- I have one on
the shelf unread called Fateful Choices: Ten Decisions That
Changed the World, 1940-1941 -- so it seems he's focusing
now on hypotheticals. In this case: what held the Nazis together
until Berlin was overrun, allowing no thought of trying to
negotiate surrender terms. Looks like the publisher already
has a sequel prepared: Gerald Steinacher: Nazis on the Run:
How Hitler's Henchmen Fled Justice (2011, Penguin Books).

Daniel C Kurtzer/Scott B Lasensky/William B Quandt/Steven
L Spiegel/Shibley Z Telhami: The Peace Puzzle: America's Quest
for Arab-Israeli Peace, 1989-2011 (2013, Cornell University
Press): Could be sub-subtitled "An Autopsy" -- that at least is
what the subject calls for, with some additional pieces on how
Israel inspired the neocons, how Israel's flagrantly illegal
counterterrorism tactics were adopted by the Americans, and how
Israel played the Iran atomic issue to distract Bush and especially
Obama from the real gaping sore in the Middle East. The authors
shouldn't be uncritical, but Kurtzer (in particular) may have
been too close to the process to call it the sham it has been.

Flynt Leverett/Hillary Mann Leverett: Going to Tehran:
Why the United States Must Come to Terms With the Islamic Republic
(2013, Metropolitan Books): Sensible appeal from diplomats and
analysts who know more than a little about Iran. They've been
arguing this for some time: lost some credibility when they told
us to deal with Iran back when there were massive demonstrations
against Ahmadinejad's reëlection, but they were right, and hoping
for regime change has yielded nothing.

Richard Lingeman: The Noir Forties: The American People
From Victory to Cold War (2012, Nation Books): The selling
of the cold war is one of the most important, least debated topics
in American history, undoing and reversing 160 years of isolation
and anti-militarism in American culture and politics, undermining
significant gains by workers and the poor, many of whom could aspire
to "middle class" status, and leading to the calculated insanity of
the new right. I'm sceptical of trying to argue politics through
culture, but it is a puzzle. Otherwise, this is just a guide to
the period's film noir.

Fredrik Logevall: Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire
and the Making of America's Vietnam (2012, Random House):
Huge (864 pp.) history of the French war, ending in defeat in 1954,
to reassert imperialist control over Vietnam, a war the US supported
and continued for another 21 years. Author has written about Vietnam
before: Choosing War: The Lost Chance for Peace and the Escalation
of War in Vietnam (1999; paperback, 2001, University of California
Press), and The Origins of the Vietnam War (paperback, 2001,
Longman). In the former, Logevall argues that the war could have
been negotiated away in 1963-65, but that US leaders chose to bet
on war instead. We all know how that worked out (or should: the
right has veered toward senescence here, as elsewhere).

Ami Pedhazur: The Triumph of Israel's Radical Right
(2012, Oxford University Press): By "radical right" he means the
followers of Meir Kahane, who were marginal (illegal even) a few
decades ago, but following martyred mass murder Baruch Goldstein
have wedged themselves into a stranglehold position over Israeli
politics, making it impossible to dismantle the settlements,
ensuring that the conflict will never end, and (in their minds)
ultimately leading to an Israeli state purged of Palestinians.
Netanyahu and Lieberman are pikers compared to them -- useful
idiots, as Stalins liked to say. Author previously wrote The
Israeli Secret Services & the Struggle Against Terrorism
(paperback, 2010, Columbia University Press).

Harvey Pekar/JT Waldman: Not the Israel My Parents Promised
Me (2012, Hill and Wang): Comic-style book, traces Pekar's
coming to terms with his parents' embrace of Zionism -- his mother
"by way of politics," his father "by way of faith," neither preparing
him for the reality of the state, its belligerence, its paranoia,
its domination and occupation.

Eyal Press: Beautiful Souls: Saying No, Breaking Ranks,
and Heeding the Voice of Conscience in Dark Times (2012,
Farrar Straus and Giroux): A book on conscience-driven acts of
disobedience, including a Swiss police captain allowing Jewish
refugees to enter "neutral" Switzerland in 1938, and Israeli
soldiers refusing to participate in the Occupation. Turns out
to be a slim book (208 pp).

Avi Raz: The Bride and the Dowry: Israel, Jordan, and
the Palestinians in the Aftermath of the June 1967 War
(2012, Yale University Press): Focuses on the first two years of
postwar occupation, when Israeli thinking about the future was in
great flux yet notably rigid: they had, after all, conquered the
land of their dreams (well, excepting the East Bank, and South
Lebanon up to the Litani), and as neocolonial settlers were
reluctant to part with any of it.

Thomas E Ricks: The Generals: American Military Command
From World War II to Today (2012, Penguin Press): Military
journalist, wrote two books on being embedded with the high command
that invaded and occupied Iraq (the first appropriately called
Fiasco), extends his historical ruminations back to WWII,
hoping he can finally find some generals worth flattering.

Shlomo Sand: The Invention of the Land of Israel: From
Holy Land to Homeland (2012, Verso): A logical successor
to the author's The Invention of the Jewish People (2009),
which questioned whether the Jews returning to Zion were in fact
descendents of the Jews who left Palestine in Roman times.

Amity Shlaes: Coolidge (2013, Harper): Partisan hack
historian as "revisionist," took on Franklin Roosevelt in The Forgotten
Man: A New History of the Great Depression (2007), goes one step
further in attempting to lionize "Silent Cal" -- US president during
the fat years of the roaring 1920s then got out before his bubble burst.
Also new: Charles C Johnson: Why Coolidge Matters: Leadership Lessons
From America's Most Underrated President (2013, Encounter Books).
One reason Coolidge matters is as that he's an icon against public
sector unions. Another is how steadfastly he served the rich under
Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon.

Nate Silver: The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many
Predictions Fail -- But Some Don't (2012, Penguin Press):
Author writes an influential blog about election polling, useful
to consult in season, in part because he has an uncanny track
record of getting those things correct, no matter how unpleasant
the results. This promises to offer more method, and the title
issue is the crux of the matter. Most folks have a lot of trouble
with statistics, so this promises to be helpful.

Oliver Stone/Peter Kuznick: The Untold History of the United
States (2013, Gallery Books): The footnotes, a mere 784 pp,
behind Stone's documentary series. Aside from some glances at the
notion of "American exceptionalism," this starts with the imperialist
grab of the Spanish-American War, the advent of "gunboat diplomacy,"
and Woodrow Wilson's World War as viewed through Smedley Butler's
notion that "war is a racket" -- a truth that no amount of Cold War
propaganda could ever erase. Also available: On History: Tariq
Ali and Oliver Stone in Conversation (paperback, 2011, Haymarket),
after Ali collaborated with Stone on the documentary South of the
Border.

Nick Turse: Kill Anything That Moves: The Real American War
in Vietnam (2013, Metropolitan): Author has written several
books on how the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have changed the US
military. Here he reexamines the grandaddy of those wars, Vietnam,
reminding us how brutal and morally debilitating that war was.
Christian Appy: "Nick Turse has done more than anyone to demonstrate --
and document -- what should finally be incontrovertible: American
atrocities in Vietnam were not infrequent and inadvertent, but the
commonplace and inevitable result of official U.S. military policy."
Marilyn Young: "Until this history is acknowledged it will be repeated,
one way or another, in the wars the U.S. continues to fight."

Joan Walsh: What's the Matter With White People: Why We
Long for a Golden Age That Never Was (2012, Wiley): Well,
you know, they let themselves be manipulated by rich people they
have nothing but race in common with, to shaft dark people who
they have more in common with than they recognize. In short,
dumb.

Michael Walzer: In God's Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew
Bible (2012, Yale University Press): Political scientist,
best known for writing the book on "just war" theory -- Just
and Unjust Wars: A Moral Argument With Historical Illustrations
(1977, revised 1992, 2000, 2006) -- then renting out his blessings
for the "war on terror." Most likely he'll prove equal ingenious
in his support for Israel.

Eli Zaretsky: Why American Needs a Left: A Historical
Argument (2012, Polity): Brief survey of the many things
the American left has fought for and, in many cases, achieved --
the end of slavery, progressivism, the New Deal, civil rights.
Don't know how well he covers the New Left, which I'd argue was
substantially successful on all front except that our distrust
of power kept us from establishing a base for defending those
gains. Needless to add, even in times when such successes are
few the need for a left continues -- in many ways, more than
ever.

Thursday, September 27. 2012

Once again, it's been way too long since the last batch of new book
notes --
July 21 -- and how far behind I've dropped is only beginning to
sink in as I've spent the last few days searching around. Forty
follow, all politics and history: many important, a few dangerous
(or at least despicable). There's at least as many left in the
file -- admittedly, some stubs -- plus I expect to find more the
more I look. That could result in a follow-up next week or in a
month or two.

Donald L Barlett/James B Steele: The Betrayal of the
American Dream (2012, PublicAffairs): Journalists, wrote
their first book on this subject back in 1992 (America: What
Went Wrong?), then followed it up in 1996 (America: Who
Stole the Dream?), and nothing's happened since then to take
their subject away. They tend to lead with an onslaught of facts,
so expect that. I used to be wary of Middle Class/American Dream
arguments, partly because the implicit narrative behind them is
one of aspiring to be ever richer. However, the new story line
is one of struggling to avoid poverty, nipping at your heels,
meaner than ever.

Michael Bar-Zohar/Nissim Mishal: Mossad: The Greatest
Missions of the Israeli Secret Service (2012, Ecco):
One of a rash of recent books on the world's best-publicized
spy force, boasting of their great works, not just abductions
and assassinations (although there have been plenty of those).
Others include: Gordon Thomas: Gideon's Spies: The Secret
History of the Mossad (784 pp.; , sixth ed., paperback, 2012,
St. Martin's Griffin); Dan Raviv/Yossi Melman: Spies Against
Armageddon: Inside Israel's Secret Wars (paperback, 2012,
Levant Books); Ephraim Lapid/Amos Gilboa, eds.: Israel's
Silent Defender: An Inside Look at Sixty Years of Israeli
Intelligence (2012, Gefen). For a somewhat more balanced
view, see Daniel Byman: A High Price: The Triumphs &
Failures of Israeli Counterterrorism (2011, Oxford
University Press).

The Bush Institute: The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic
Growth America Needs (2012, Crown Business): After eight years
as president with virtually no net growth once they blew away the
housing bubble, Bush's advisers think they've finally figured out
how to grow the economy. GW wrote the forward. The book proper claims
five Nobel economists, starting with Robert Lucas -- probably the
most completely discredited man in the profession -- and ending with
Myron Scholes, the genius behind Long Term Capital Management (long
since defunct).

James Carville/Stan Greenberg: It's the Middle Class,
Stupid! (2012, Blue Rider Press): Note: comma omitted on
front cover, suggesting several alternative parsings. Professional
political hacks, i.e., people who somehow get paid for getting it
all wrong. I've never liked Obama's middle class fetishism, but
that's probably his idea of defensible ground, along with all the
other God and patriotic gore he peddles. If Carville has any
redeeming merit, it's that he's often crass, and once in a blue
moon right.

Michael J Casey: The Unfair Trade: How Our Broken Global
Financial System Destroys the Middle Class (2012, Crown
Business): Australian reporter, takes an international view of
the crisis. Not sure how well the "middle class" angle ties in
here, although the drive of the financial elites to skim an ever
greater slice of the profit and the race to the bottomn of the
labor market are certain to take their toll on anyone in between.

Steve Coll: Private Empire: ExxonMobil and American Power
(2012, Penguin Press): A corporate biography from the Exxon Valdez
disaster to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, with plenty of bumps
along the road.
[link]

Gail Collins: As Texas Goes . . . : How the Lone Star State
Hijacked the American Agenda (2012, Liveright): Political
reporter, raised in Ohio, groomed in Connecticut, tramps around Texas
in search of what stinks, which turns out to be pretty much everything,
except perhaps the people's sense of humor. Previously wrote When
Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960
to the Present (2009, Little Brown); before that America's
Women: 400 Years of Dolls, Drudges, Helpmates, and Heroines (2003,
William Morrow), and Scorpion Tongues: Gossip, Celegbrity, and
American Politics (1998, William Morrow), and most recently a
biography of William Henry Harrison (in a Times Books series -- looks
like she drew the short straw).

Edward Conard: Unintended Consequences: Why Everything You've
Been Told About the Economy Is Wrong (2012, Portfolio): Romney's
buddy at Bain Capital, takes pseudo-contrarian stands mostly to argue
that he (and Romney) should be making even more money, that inequality
is a great thing, and that if you don't believe him you're just a sore
loser, an envious shithead.

David Crist: The Twilight War: The Secret History of
America's Thirty-Year Conflict with Iran (2012, Penguin
Press): Latest news charges Iran with launching denial-of-service
cyberattacks against New York banks. Wonder where they got that
idea? Google "stuxnet": a computer virus the US developed and
Israel used against Iran. Cyberattacks are effectively acts of
war, even though they have yet to escalate to guns and rockets.
There is much to complain about the Iranian government, but the
30-year conflict Crist writes about was born of ineptness at how
badly the US reacted to the ouster of a Shah originally installed
by the CIA but who had mutated into an embarrassment -- a wound
that the US has continued to ineptly pick at, mostly hubris but
aggravated once Israel decided to make Iran their public enemy
number one. Today we seem closer than ever to war -- arguably
with the cyberattacks, assassinations of Iranian scientists,
support for the MEK terrorists, and above all sanctions meant
to cripple Iran's economy, the US is already committed to war
by one means or another.

Christopher de Bellaigue: Patriot of Persia: Muhammad
Mossadegh and a Tragic Anglo-American Coup (2012, Harper):
Background on the man who may have been the best hope ever for a
democratic, peaceful Iran, except that he objected to Britain's
fraudulent control of Iranian oil -- a 19th-century grant of the
long-defunct Qajjar dynasty -- so the British pressured the US
to orchestrate a coup in 1953.

EJ Dionne Jr: Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle
for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (2012, Bloomsbury):
Liberal-leaning political journalist, gives more credit to conservatives
than they deserve, but that doesn't necessarily lead to the sort of
confused centrism that is the norm of the socalled liberal media.
Seems likely that Dionne will make the point that sometimes people
back conservatives for good reasons -- although most clearly what they
get are ignorant brutes set on destroying what's left of civilization.

John Dower: Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering: Japan
in the Modern World (2012, New Press): Wrote two important
books on Japan (War Without Mercy and Embracing Defeat,
then took his eye off his niche when the Bush people tried to claim
Japan as a model for how well they'd do rebuilding Iraq, but here
he returns to his chosen field. Looks like this carries the first
two books forward in history as both countries made mental and
cultural adjustments that allowed them to work together (even if
not on equal terms).

Dinesh D'Souza: Obama's America: Unmaking the American
Dream (2012, Regnery): Having previously discerned Obama's
inner Mau-Mau (Newt Gingrich: "the most profound insight I have read
in the last six years"), right-wing America's favorite adopted con man
further discovers that Obama "wants a smaller America, a poorer
America, an America unable to exert its will, an America happy to be
one power among many, an America in decline so that other nations
might rise -- all in the name of global fairness." Of course, as a
matter of principle, the right's against anything that smacks of
fairness, but four years into Obama's presidency, that's the best case
they can make? I should probably do a full post on the latest round of
Obama hate literature, but it's so uninspired and empty. Some
examples: Deneen Borelli: Backlash: How Obama and the Left Are
Driving Americans to the Government Plantation; Ann Coulter:
Mugged: Racial Demagoguery From the Seventies to Obama; Bruce
Herschensohn: Obama's Globe: A President's Abandonment of US Allies
Around the World; Hugh Hewitt: The Brief Against Obama: The
Rise, Fall & Epic Fail of the Hope & Change Presidency;
Paul Kengor: The Communist: Frank Marshall Davis: The Untold Story
of Barack Obama's Mentor; Aaron Klein: Fool Me Twice: Obama's
Shocking Plans for the Next Four Years Exposed; Edward Klein:
The Amateur: Barack Obama in the White House; Stanley Kurtz:
Spreading the Wealth: How Obama Is Robbing the Suburbs to Pay for
the Cities; David Limbaugh: The Great Destroyer: Barack Obama's
War on the Republic; Richard Miniter: Leading From Behind: The
Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide for Him; Kate
Obenshain: Divider-in-Chief: The Fraud of Hope and Change;
Katie Pavlich: Fast and Furious: Barack Obama's Bloodiest Scandal
and the Shameless Cover-Up; Michael Savage: Trickle Down
Tyranny: Crushing Obama's Dream of the Socialist States of
America; Phyllis Schlafly: No Higher Power: Obama's War on
Religious Freedom.

Peter Edelman: So Rich, So Poor: Why's It's So Hard to End
Poverty in America (2012, New Press): Could it be because
once Nixon appointed Donald Rumsfeld to head up Equal Opportunity
nobody cared and nobody tried? Edelman worked for Robert Kennedy
in the 1960s, much later for Bill Clinton in the 1990s before
resigning when Clinton signed the 1996 "welfare reform" bill --
Clinton's own term for it, as I recall, was "a sack of shit."

Kurt Eichenwald: 500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror
Wars (2012, Touchstone): Focuses on 18 months, a little
over 500 days, from 9/11/2011 to the invasion of Iraq, following
Bush and company through their tortured logic leading to tortured
prisoners, countering terror with "shock and awe" -- as someone
must have said, "the mother of all terrors." Digs up some juicy
quotes, my favorite so far Chirac's "Does anyone know what he
was talking about?"

Charles H Ferguson: Predator Nation: Corporate Criminals,
Political Corruption, and the Hijacking of America (2012,
Crown Business): Director of the Oscar-winning film Inside Job --
in his acceptance speech Ferguson pointed out that three years into
the depression no one has gone to jail for the financial manipulations
that nearly bankrupt the country, so the point here seems to be to
name names and lay out the case for the prosecution.

Norman G Finkelstein: Knowing Too Much: Why the American
Jewish Romance With Israel Is Coming to an End (2012, paperback,
OR Books): Hard to guess how this will play out as political prophecy,
but it certainly is the case that there has been a steady erosion of
Jewish-American support for Israel as the David-Goliath table has
turned, as Israel's has become more right-wing anti-democratic, as
Israel's political leaders become ever more contemptuous of human
rights and the desire for peace -- in short, as Americans learn more
about what actually goes on under the aegis of The Jewish State. At
the very least, Finkelstein can be counted on to help understand
the history. Finkelstein also has another short (100 pp) book,
What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage
(paperback, 2012, OR Books).

Richard L Hasen: The Voting Wars: From Florida 2000 to
the Next Election Meltdown (2012, Yale University Press):
Book came out in August, but would be much longer if author had
waited until after November to assess the rash of voter ID laws
Republicans put in place after winning so many 2010 elections.
Say what you will about Obama, the economy, health care reform,
and the Tea Party, the difference between 2008 and 2010 came
down to a massive drop in voting, from 116 to 83 million: the
more people the Republicans can keep away from the polls, the
better their chances. Don't know whether Hasen spells this out
or not, but "gaming the system" is no less than an attack on
the fundamentals of democracy.

Christopher Hayes: Twilight of the Elites: America After
Meritocracy (2012, Crown): The idea that anyone could rise
in America commensurate with their talent, effort, and achievement,
is passé. America is an oligarchy, not a meritocracy, and Hayes at
least has finally figured that out. Lots of reasons are possible
here: the simplest is that in a declining economy -- the measure
of which is median wages and wealth, and both in real terms have
declined for more than 30 years -- the elites have fewer job slots
available, and the rich want them for their own idiot offspring.
By the way, it wasn't Obama and Clinton who decided to tank the
country -- they were poster boys for the meritocratic impulse, or
would have been if their politics were more right-wing; it was
the business elites who thought they were maligned in the 1970s
and who thought they were brilliant in the 1980s who pushed their
short-term self-serving game way past its limits and luck.

Chris Hedges/Joe Sacco: Days of Destruction Days of Revolt
(2012, Nation Books): Pine Ridge, SD; Camden, NJ; southern WV; Imoakalee,
FL; Occupy Wall Street. Hedges reports, and rails; Sacco illustrates
(although he has a book in his own right called Journalism).

Tom Holland: In the Shadow of the Sword: The Birth of Islam
and the Rise of the Global Arab Empire (2012, Doubleday):
Wrote two books of ancient history, one on Rome (Rubicon: The
Last Years of the Roman Republic) and one on the Middle East
(Persian Fire: The First World Empire and the Battle for the
West), and now has two more even more complementary, The
Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the
West, which runs from Otto to the Crusades, so this adds to
the back story, the rise of Islam. When I read Forge, I
was struck by the nastiness of his take on Islam, which doesn't
bode well here.

Seth G Jones: Hunting in the Shadows: The Pursuit of
Al Qa'ida Since 9/11 (2012, WW Norton): RAND analyst,
wrote a useful book on Afghanistan (In the Graveyard of
Empires: America's War in Afghanistan), but lately has
turned into a full-time apologist for the US occupation of
Afghanistan. If this book is honest, one thing you will see
is how little the US military contributed to the "hunt" --
even granting that the Bin Laden kill was their action. Still,
you won't find Jones questioning the whole mission, or how the
US earned Al-Qaeda's enmity in the first place.

Yaakov Katz/Yoaz Hendel: Israel Vs. Iran: The Shadow
War (2012, Potomac Books): Documents Israel's ongoing
activities to wage war against Iran -- assassinations, computer
viruses, sanctions, political subversion -- as well as various
Israeli wars against supposed Iranian fronts like Syria, Hamas
in Gaza, and Hezbollah in Lebanon, finding them all inadequate,
favoring a full-out attack. For more pro-war propaganda, see
Robert D. Blackwill/Elliot Abrams, et al., Iran: The Nuclear
Challenge (paperback, 2012, Council on Foreign Relations
Press).

Paul Krugman: End This Depression Now! (2012, WW
Norton): A basic, straightforward guide to what is wrong with the
economy today, and what can (and should) be done about it. Analysis
is basic macroeconomics from Keynes to Minsky to Bernanke (who used
to know something about this before he became the bankers' tool).
Doesn't put as much emphasis on the role of inequality as I would,
but does at least recognize that the recovery is stalled mostly by
political design, and can prove that. Also lots on the Euro, which
is a different problem, also political.

Mike Lofgren: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy,
Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted
(2012, Viking): Some sort of Washington insider, which may be why
he's stuck in the trap of blaming both parties, when the main thing
wrong with the Democrats is that they let Republicans play them for
suckers -- a problem exacerbated by the middle-of-the-roaders who
keep legitimizing the right, but it's deeper than that: in a system
where success depends on chasing money, the Democrats who are most
successful are most easily estranged from their constituents. In
that, the main difference between the parties isn't their common
ideology, but how they shape that message to be palatable by their
voters. No idea whether Lofgren gets this, but at least he's started
to notice that the collateral damage is getting close to home.

Keith Lowe: Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of
World War II (2012, St Martin's Press): Focuses on the
turmoil Europe suffered after the defeat of the Third Reich --
the massive destruction, the displaced people, the more/less punitive
(or sometimes just inept) occupations (especially the Soviets in
eastern Europe), the struggles between partisans and collaborators,
etc. Quite a few books have started to focus on this, perhaps because
way too many policy people had such a rosy view of occupation going
into Iraq in 2003.

James Mann: The Obamians: The Struggle Inside the White
House to Redefine American Power (2012, Viking): Wrote a
book about the Bush administration which was less inside story
than useful background (Rise of the Vulcans: The History of
Bush's War Cabinet). This suggests less coherence, which is
likely true, especially as one tries to fathom the depths of the
military-security state and how intractable it seems -- not that
it helps that Obama doesn't have a coherent view in the first
place.

Thomas E Mann/Norman J Ornstein: It's Even Worse Than It
Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided With the New
Politics of Extremism (2012, Basic Books): The US Constitution
predates the development of political parties, assuming that a delicate
balance of powers would lead reasonable men to compromise. This system
has failed several times, notably over the issue of slavery leading to
the 1861-65 Civil War, and is failing again, as the Republicans have
combined a winner-takes-all view of tactics with an ideology that
argues that anything government does is likely to be bad so there is
no downside to obstructing a government led by their enemies.
Previously wrote The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing
America and How to Get It Back on Track (2006; paperback, 2008,
Oxford University Press).

David Maraniss: Barack Obama: The Story (2012,
Simon & Schuster): Big bio (672 pp.) that doesn't get very
far: he leaves off with Obama still in his 20s, leaving plenty
of room for future volumes, a project I've seen likened to Robert
A Caro's still-unfinished LBJ series, expecting him to spend most
of his career digging up trivia about Obama and his family.

Miko Peled: The General's Son: Journey of an Israeli in
Palestine (2012, Just World Books): Memoir, touching on
his father's complicated role in Israel's wars and postwar politics,
and on his niece, the victim of a suicide bomber, but mostly on
the country he grew up in.

Paul Preston: The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and
Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain (2012, WW Norton):
Less well known than the early Inquisition launched in 1492 to rid
Spain of its Jews and Muslims, but actually linearly connected,
the rubric under which Franco executed tens of thousands from
1936 to 1945, a period when he was allied with Nazi Germany.
Preston previously wrote, The Spanish Civil War: Reaction,
Revolution, and Revenge (2nd ed, paperback, 2007, WW Norton).

Seth Rosenfeld: Subversives: The FBI's War on Student
Radicals, and Reagan's Rise to Power (2012, Farrar Straus
and Giroux): Another big book (752 pp.), but the author managed
to get hold of 250,000 pages of FBI files on student radicals
from Berkeley's Free Speech Movement into the 1970s. J. Edgar
Hoover got his first taste of power in the Palmer Raids of 1919,
so he rarely missed an opportunity to sniff out subversives --
an obsession with thought control you'd think un-American. One
story uncovered is how close Hoover was to Reagan, who built at
least one leg of his career on bashing students. Seems like an
important book.

Michael J Sandel: What Money Can't Buy: The Moral Limits
of Markets (2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Philosopher,
previously wrote Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do?
(2009), poses various questions about what should or should not
be up for sale. If he can find anything, the notion that markets
have limits is significant.

Kay Lehman Schlozman/Sidney Verba/Henry E Brady: The
Unheavenly Chorus: Unequal Political Voice and the Broken Promise
of American Policy (2012, Princeton University Press):
Argues that "American democracy is marred by deeply ingrained
and persistent class-based political inequality," and backs
that up with enough statistics to choke a horse (728 pp). True,
of course, as is the intuition that democracy depends on an
effort to effect and affirm equality even if it isn't strictly
factual. This isn't impossible, or even terribly difficult: for
most of US history the notions that we were created equal, that
we stand equal before the law, that we should enjoy equal
opportunities, that the government is subject to the will
of the people, etc., has been ensconced in patriotic myth --
anything else would be un-American.

Robert Skidelsky/Edward Skidelsky: How Much Is Enough?
Money and the Good Life (2012, Other Press): Pivotal
question, one that should provide against all sorts of other
obsessions, including working yourself to death. It should help
that Robert Skidelsky is the biographer of John Maynard
Keynes, who thought even more about the good life than he did
about the pursuit of money.

Joseph E Stiglitz: The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided
Society Endangers Our Future (2012, WW Norton): The top 1 percent
of Americans control 40 percent of the nation's wealth, which makes that
wealth unavailable for remedying the real problems we face. Let's go a
bit further and say that that much inequality is itself a problem, which
I hope Stiglitz manages to demonstrate. Nor is the problem just numbers,
as Stiglitz's Mismeasuring Our Lives: Why GDP Doesn't Add Up shows.

Charles Townshend: Desert Hell: The British Invasion of
Mesopotamia (2011, Harvard University Press): The original
Gulf War, 1914-24, when Britain drove the Ottomans out of Iraq
and found their colonial intentions quite unwelcome and imperial
cronies unwelcome -- "a cautionary tale for makers of national
policy."

Nick Turse/Tom Engelhardt: Terminator Planet: The First
History of Drone Warfare 2001-2050 (paperback, 2012,
CreateSpace): What it says, although maybe not the first. See also:
Medea Benjamin: Drone Warfare: Killing by Remote Control
(paperback, 2012, OR Books). There is also a small shelf full of
drone techie books, like Bill Yenne: Birds of Prey: Predators,
Reapers and America's Newest UAVs in Combat (paperback, 2010,
Specialty), and Matt J Martin: Predator: The Remote-Control Air
War Over Iraq and Afghanistan: A Pilot's Story (paperback,
2010, Zenith Press).

Patrick Tyler: Fortress Israel: The Inside Story of the
Military Elite Who Run the Country -- and Why They Can't Make
Peace (2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): Nearly everyone
in Israel (women as well as men, but not Palestinians, and not
some Ultra-Orthodox) is drafted into the military, most remaining
in the reserves until they're 49 -- a degree of militarization
unknown anywhere else in the world. The military in turn becomes
a stepping stone toward career success, especially in politics
but also in business. The net effect is to drive Israel ever more
to the right politically, into a bind where the greatest threat
to the system that so many key people benefited from is peace.
So this in itself is a big part of why there is no peace in the
region.

Richard Wolff: Occupy the Economy: Challenging Capitalism
(paperback, 2012, City Lights): Economic professor, doesn't like the
way things have been going, "in conversation with David Barsamian,"
so he likely keeps it basic and to the point. In 2009, Wolff wrote
Capitalism Hits the Fan: The Global Economic Meltdown and What to
Do About It.

James Carroll: Jerusalem, Jerusalem: How the Ancient City
Ignored Our Modern World (2011; paperback, 2012, Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt): The city in history and myth, from Abraham through
the Assyrians and Romans and Crusaders to Arafat and Olmert, a sad
tale -- an object lesson in fetishism, don't you think?
[link]

Thomas Frank: Pity the Billionaire: The Hard-Times Swindle
and the Unlikely Comeback of the Right (2012, Metropolitan
Books; paperback, 2012, Picador): Disgraced by reality -- the wars
in Afghanistan and Iraq, the inept government response Katrina, the
revolt against Bush's "mandate" to gut social security, the collapse
of the entire Western economy followed by trillions of dollars of
bailouts -- the right bounced back by embracing fantasy, and cowed
the media (much wholly owned by the right anyway) to go along and
pump up the "tea party" effort.
[link]

Richard Wilkinson/Kate Pickett: The Spirit Level: Why
Greater Equality Makes Societies Stronger (2009; paperback,
2011, Bloomsbury Press): Important book on how greater inequality
is bad for your health, as well as general well being.
[link]

Saturday, July 21. 2012

Forty more book squibs. Last one was
April 19, so I figured another one was overdue. Looking back
at my scrach file, I found about sixty piled up, but many were
just stubs with future publication dates starting in late April:
examples include Paul Krugman's End This Depression Now,
Steve Coll's Private Empire, John De Graaf/David K Batker's
What's the Economy For, Anyway? -- books that I've managed
to read while my research lagged. Normally, I'd dive in and fill
out those stubs, but then I'd wind up with two columns worth of
books, and I don't really have time right now. So here's what I
do have.

Daron Acenoglu/James Robinson: Why Nations Fail: The
Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (2012, Crown
Business): The answer they find is "man-made political and economic
institutions" -- an easy case study is to compare North and South
Korea; harder ones go back to ancient Rome and medieval Venice,
and try to predict where the US and China are going (mostly down,
I gather). Authors previously wrote Economic Origins of Dictatorship
and Democracy (2005, Cambridge University Press).

Terry H Anderson: Bush's Wars (2011, Oxford University
Press): An attempt at a big view synthesis of Bush's seven-year war
path, plus a bit more on Obama's prosecution of same, but at 312 pp
he'll also have to boil a lot down. Billed as a "balanced history,"
that also means he'll have to tidy up the manifest failures of policies
that could hardly have been more deranged.

Ken Ballen: Terrorists in Love: The Real Lives of Islamic
Radicals (2011, Free Press): Can't fault one for wanting to
get a broader, deeper look at the people castigated as terrorists,
even a federal prosecutor. Foreword by Peter L. Bergen.

Jason Burke: The 9/11 Wars (2011, Allen Lane;
paperback, 2011, Penguin Global): British journalist, based in
New Delhi, reports on various conflicts of the last decade, but
mostly in and around Afghanistan. Previously wrote Al-Qaeda:
The True Story of Radical Islam (paperback, 2004, IB Tauris).

Susan Cain: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That
Can't Stop Talking (2012, Crown): Reassurance, support, defense,
therapy for the one-third of all people classified as introverts,
touting their little-appreciated advantages. Written by an introvert
with a Harvard Law degree. She compares her book to Betty Friedan's,
which is a bit of a stretch, but as someone who's explicitly been
denied more than one job because he wasn't considered outgoing enough,
I appreciate the effort.

William D Cohan: Money and Power: How Goldman Sachs Came
to Rule the World (2011; paperback, 2012, Anchor): Finance
writer, wrote House of Cards: A Tale of Hubris and Wretched
Excess on Wall Street (2009, Doubleday) when the abyss opened
his eyes. Big book on why Goldman Sachs was not just too big but
too ruthless (and too well connected) to fail.

Nancy L Cohen: Delirium: How the Sexual Counterrevolution Is
Polarizing America (2012, Counterpoint): Counterrevolution?
The main thing that the political successes of the anti-abortion
crowd shows is that the nation is becoming less democratic, less
respectful of personal views, and less tolerant -- more eager to
take advantage of temporary accidents (like the mass insanity of
the 2010 elections) to impose an anti-popular straitjacket of law.

Lizzie Collingham: The Taste of War: World War II and the
Battle for Food (2012, Penguin): Covers the whole world
during the war, focusing on how the armies and civilians were fed,
or in many cases not -- the Bengal famine one famous case, far
away from any front but linked nonetheless.

Peter Corning: The Fair Society: The Science of Human
Nature and the Pursuit of Social Justice (2011, University
of Chicago Press): Tries to build a human nature case for equality,
equity, and reciprocity as the basic building blocks of society.
I'm always leery of biosociology, but the political case for the
same strikes me as if not quite self-evident about the only one
that can be reasoned. Another book along these lines is Samuel
Bowles/Herbert Gintis: A Cooperative Species: Human Reciprocity
and Its Evolution (2011, Princeton University Press).

John D'Agata/Jim Fingal: The Lifespan of a Fact
(paperback, 2012, WW Norton): Short argument over the difference
between truth and facts, with D'Agata billed as the "author" and
Fingal as the "fact checker." D'Agata previously wrote About
a Mountain, on the Yucca Mountain nuclear dump, and evidently
had some trouble with his facts (and fact-checkers).

Emanuel Derman: Models. Behaving. Badly.: Why Confusing
Illusion with Reality Can Lead to Disaster, on Wall Street and in
Life (2011, Free Press): A Goldman Sachs quant looks back
on the art of model building, discovering some limits to models,
and rethinking their usefulness. Mostly finance with some asides
on science and philosophy -- Derman started out as a physicist.
Would be interesting to look at other areas where modelling puts
people out on a limb. Previously wrote My Life as a Quant:
Reflections on Physics and Finance (2004; paperback, 2007,
Wiley).

John Patrick Diggins: Why Niebuhr Now? (2011,
University of Chicago Press): American cold war-era theologian,
died in 1971, has returned lately as a touchstone for both pro-
and anti-war politicians and polemicists -- Andrew J. Bacevich
keyed one of his recent books off Niebuhr and wrote an intro
to a reprint of Niebuhr's The Irony of American History,
while Diggins also starts with laudatory quotes from McCain and
Obama.

Peter Eichstaedt: Consuming the Congo: War and Conflict
Minerals in the World's Deadliest Place (2011, Lawrence
Hill): Valuable minerals, corrupt politicians, expendable people,
you can focus on the post-1994 war that killed five million, or
go back all the way to King Leopold, or for that matter earlier
when Kongo was one of Africa's most prodigious slave entrepots.

Charles Fishman: The Big Thirst: The Secret Life and
Turbulent Future of Water (2011, Free Press): Something
on the future water crisis, more on the oddities of current use,
and bits about Saturn and other esoteric sources. Previous book
was The Wal-Mart Effect: How the World's Most Powerful Company
Really Works -- and How It's Transforming the American Economy,
which suggests a journalist's eye and a quest for big pictures.

Don Fulsom: Nixon's Darkest Secrets: The Inside Story of
America's Most Troubled President (2012, Thomas Dunne Books):
Not quite the same thing as Nixon's Greatest Crimes -- most of which
were hard to keep secret, and some were even bragged about -- but
related in all sorts of dark and deviously backhanded ways.

Jonah Goldberg: The Tyranny of Clichés: How Liberals Cheat
in the War of Ideas (2012, Sentinel HC): More from the guy
who taught you that Fascism is friendly. Of course, liberals cheat:
they use facts, logic, argue for the public good, advocate change
in favor of greater fairness and more equal opportunity. And they
don't go around calling people Fascists, except when they are.

Michael Grabell: Money Well Spent? The Truth Behind the
Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in
History (2012, Public Affairs): Refers to the "American
Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009," which as I recall proposed
well less than $1 trillion, and was further watered down with tax
breaks that translated poorly into spending. (Grabell claims the
higher figure "when extensions and inflation adjustments are factored
in.") It's a fair question which deserves a fair treatment; doubt
this is it.

Elizabeth Holtzman/Cynthia L Cooper: Cheating Justice: How Bush
and Cheney Attacked the Rule of Law, Plotted to Avoid Prosecution -- and
What We Can Do About It (2011, Beacon Press): Former prosecutor
and congresswoman, wrote a book during the Bush reign laying out the case
for impeachment, remains hot on the miscreants' tails. Good thing someone
is. Nothing Obama did or didn't do has disappointed me so much as his
unwillingness to look back at the Bush years and expose the malfeasances
there -- and not just because had he done so he would have been forced
to think twice before repeating so many of them.

Robert Johnson: The Afghan Way of War: How and Why They
Fight (2011, Oxford University Press): A survey of the
changing tactics used by Afghan warriors since the 19th century
to fight off foreign aggression, which since 2001 means the US
(and its NATO allies).

Peter D Kiernan: Becoming China's Bitch: and Nine More
Catastrophes We Must Avoid Right Now (2012, Turner): Another
self-declared "centrist" (and former Goldman Sachs partner) out to
save the nation from problems like, "our semiconscious dependency on
China, our lack of a centrally coordinated intelligence effort, our
downward-spiraling health-care system, and the continually expanding
problem of illegal immigration."

Andrew Kilman: The Failure of Capitalist Production: Underlying
Causes of the Great Recession (paperback, 2011, Pluto Press):
A Marxist critique of the Great Recession -- author previously wrote
Reclaiming Marx's Capital: A Refutation of the Myth of Inconsistency.
Title seems a bit misleading: I doubt that there was a problem with
production so much as declining profits sent capitalists elsewhere in
search of higher gains, especially into finance where it was easy to
create imaginary value, at least while it lasted.

Kristin Kimball: The Dirty Life: A Memoir of Farming, Food,
and Love (2010; paperback, 2011, Scribner): NY journalist
moves to a 500 acre farm in Vermont, resolves to grow everything
one needs for "a whole diet" -- meat and dairy as well as veggies
and grains, so there's an element here of moving off the grid.

Charles A Kupchan: No One's World: The West, the Rising
Rest, and the Coming Global Turn (2012, Oxford University
Press): An antidote to the silly genre of books predicting who will
dominate whom in the coming century, as domination itself becomes
both less possible and less desirable.

Kwasi Kwarteng: Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in
the Modern World (2012, Public Affairs): British historian
and politician (Conservative MP), parents came to England from
Ghana, so he knows a bit about the late empire from both ends,
but like many of his countrymen may tend to the effect, most of
all the benefit, of having experienced British rule.

Walter Laqueur: After the Fall: The End of the European Dream
and the Decline of a Continent (2012, Thomas Dunne Books):
Historian, now in his 90s, has written about Fascism, anti-semitism,
Zionism (which he strongly identifies with, having escaped pre-WWII
Poland for Palestine). Predicts gloom and doom for Europe.

David Marsh: The Euro: The Battle for the New Global Currency
(paperback, 2011, Yale University Press): The background on how the Euro
came about, and why it's not working out so well. Revised and updated from
some previous book, possibly Marsh's 2010 The Euro: The Politics of the
New Global Currency. Also related: Johan van Overtveldt: The End of
the Euro: The Uneasy Future of the European Union (2011, Agate B2).

Chris Martenson: The Crash Course: The Unsustainable Future
of Our Economy, Energy, and Environment (2011, Wiley): Peak
oil, of course, and peak damn-near-everything else, plus the notion
of tipping points, suggest that the economic collapse may differ from
previous recessions not just because we're treating it with uncommon
stupidity -- there may be insurmountable structural problems beneath
the usual cycles. I think there's some truth to this.

Richard Martin: Super-Fuel: Thorium, the Green Energy Source
for the Future (2012, Palgrave Macmillan): Tries to make the
case for nuclear power plants fueled by thorium instead of uranium.
Thorium is at least as plentiful as uranium. It is radioactive, but
less so than uranium, which makes it a more expensive fuel, but also
safer -- both in the reactor and as waste -- and has less proliferation
risk. India has done the most work toward commercializing thorium power
plants, and expects to get 30% of its electricity from thorium by 2050.
Looks like the book greatly exaggerates its prospects.

Ralph Nader: Getting Steamed to Overcome Corporatism: Build
It Together to Win (paperback, 2011, Common Courage Press):
Don't know whether he's running for president again, but it doesn't
to hedge your bets with a campaign book. And I'm sure it was a hell
of a lot easier to write than anything Mitt Romney or Newt Gingrich
brokered. Even has some value if he doesn't run.

James Lawrence Powell: Dead Pool: Lake Powell, Global
Warming, and the Future of Water in the West (2011,
University of California Press): Lake Powell is currently about
half-full, or half-empty if that's your preference, its needs
tapped out by cities like Las Vegas that wouldn't exist but for
Colorado River water (and hydroelectric power). It supply has
long failed to satisfy the Colorado Compact which optimistically
divvied up the water to various states, and global warming only
promises drier years ahead. Also on the subject: Jonathan Waterman:
Running Dry: A Journey From Source to Sea Down the Colorado
River (2010, National Geographic); and Norris Hundley Jr:
Water and the West: The Colorado River Compact and the Politics
of Water in the American West (paperback, 2009, University
of California Press).

Dylan Ratigan: Greedy Bastards: How We Can Stop Corporate
Communists, Banksters, and Other Vampires from Sucking America Dry
(2012, Simon & Schuster): Author has a daytime talk show, evidently
left of center despite the hallucinatory title. I understand that
"vampires" may be some sort of metaphor, but "corporate communists"
is impossible to pin down (despite the smell).

David Rothkopf: Power, Inc.: The Epic Rivalry Between Big
Business and Government -- and the Reckoning That Lies Ahead
(2012, Farrar Straus and Giroux): What rivalry? Doesn't he know that
government's been bought and paid for? That the only real conflicts
left are between the corporate sponsors? That there is no such thing
as a "public interest" anymore? Previously wrote Superclass: The
Global Power Elite and the World They Are Making.

Ellen E Schultz: Retirement Heist: How Corporations Plunder and
Profit From the Nest Eggs of American Workers (2011, Portfolio):
I was enrolled in a pension plan only once in my working career -- with
a company that wound up under Chapter 11. (Everything else has been
401k, if even that.) No sooner than the papers were filed, the creditors
decided that the pension was "overfunded" and moved to dissolve it. I
got a small check, and that was the end of it. So that's one example
of the "plunder and profit" Schultz writes about. No doubt there are
many more.

Martin Sieff: That Should Still Be Us: How Thomas Friedman's
Flat World Myths Are Keeping Us Flat on Our Backs (2012,
John Wiley): Refuting Friedman's nonsense should be the easy part.
The hard part is figuring out how people dumb enough to buy into
Friedman actually did things. That they turned out to be damaging,
well, that's easier.

Francis Spufford: Red Plenty (paperback, 2012,
Oxford University Press): A novel (of some sort) based on the
promise of central economic planning in the Soviet Union, a concept
you probably expected to have been expunged in the collapse of the
Soviet Union. Nick Hornby called it "a hammer-and-sickle version
of Altman's Nashville." Crooked Timber has done a whole
series of posts on this book.

Barb Stuckey: Taste What You're Missing: The Passionate
Eater's Guide to Why Good Food Tastes Good (2012, Free
Press): The science of taste, possibly the psychology, maybe even
a bit of art. Possibly similar but heavier: Gordon M Shepherd:
Neurogastronomy: How the Brain Creates Flavor and Why It
Matters (2011, Columbia University Press); older: Hervé This:
Molecular Gastronomy: Exploring the Science of Flavor
(paperback, 2005, Columbia University Press).

David Swanson, ed: The Military Industrial Complex at 50
(paperback, 2011, self-published): It bogles the mind to think what
Eisenhower might make of his Military-Industrial Complex fifty years
and many wars later. An interesting list of contributors, most of
whom have elsewhere registered how appalled they are.

Nicholas Wapshott: Keynes/Hayek: The Clash That Defined
Modern Economics (2011, WW Norton): Actually, when both
were alive it wasn't much of a clash: Hayek was obsessed with
communism, which Keynes properly regarded as irrelevant. Keynes
was an immensely important analyst of the Great Depression, and
Hayek was a right-wing crank -- someone who wouldn't be remembered
today except that other right-wingers find him useful. So trying
to square the two against each other is a bit far fetched. Why?
Wapshott previously wrote Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher:
A Political Marriage.

Colin Woodard: American Nations: A History of the Eleven
Rival Regional Cultures of North America (2011, Viking):
Books indulging this impulse to hack us up and sort us out come
every few years -- cf. Joel Garreau: The Nine Nations of North
America and, maybe, Dante Chinni: Our Patchwork Nation:
The Surprising Truth About the "Real" America. This one
promises more history, hence more overdetermination.

My paperback notes are all stubs too, so will hold until next time.
I shouldn't wait three months to do one of these, then not have the
time to bring it up to date.

Friday, July 6. 2012

Several stories going around recently about Jonathan Krohn,
one-time 13-year-old conservative wunderkind, now at 17 some sort
of movement apostate supporting Obama and gay marriage -- e.g.,
this one by
Benjy Sarlin, and another by
Alex Pareene. Reminds me that I wrote a squib on his 2010 book:

Jonathan Krohn: Defining Conservatism: The Principles That
Will Bring Our Country Back (2010, Vanguard Press): Teenage
philosopher, self-published an earlier draft of this book when he
was 13; is more like 15 now, out giving speeches at Tea Parties and
CPAC. Identifies four principles: defend the Constitution, respect
human life, minimalist government, personal responsibility. Those
principles are sophisticated enough it might be possible to flip him,
unlike less thoughtful conservatives whose principles are more like
"be white" and "inherit (or steal) a lot of money" and "slaughter
people not like us." Talks a lot about "natural laws" and gibberish
like that. Clearly is a smart kid with a lot to learn.

I remember that when I was nine I gave a speech, on the occasion
of Wichita being selected as an "All American City," to my entire
elementary school that was full of patriotic platitudes, and when
I was thirteen I fell under the influence of a close friend who was
a rabid Barry Goldwater supporter -- although I seriously doubt that
even then I had any sympathy for Goldwater's anti-civil rights views,
nor for his rabid belligerence, especially vs. Vietnam. (Within a
year, my views on those subjects firmed up, and by the time I was
seventeen I was solidly new left -- a stance I eventually moderated
but never disowned.)

So I was familiar with the notion that one could shift political
views after age thirteen. On the other hand, I'm not sure how often
it actually happens. I doubt, for instance, that my Goldwater friend
ever moved much, although I haven't heard of him in 45 years. Among
what passes for thinkers on the conservative side, nearly all were
born to the calling, and few ever gave it a second thought (Buckley
Jr. and Bill Kristol certainly didn't). After all, it could hardly
be easier to think that all is right in a world you were born to
lord over.

Wednesday, June 20. 2012

The New York Times Sunday Book Review once again went out of its way
to reestablish its centrist (conservative) credentials by recruiting
Matthew Bishop to pan Paul Krugman's book, End This Depression Now!
The key paragraph with his laundry list of objections:

To this Moderately Serious Reviewer, Krugman's habit of bashing
anyone who does not share his conclusions is not merely stylistically
irritating; it is flawed in substance. The rise in unemployment may be
largely the result of inadequate demand, but that does not mean there
has been no contribution from structural changes like the substitution
of cheap foreign workers and innovative technology for some jobs in
rich countries. The austerians may be excessively fearful of so-called
"bond vigilantes," but that does not mean there is no need to worry
about what investors think about the health of a government's
finances. Sure, ridicule those fundamentalists who believe it is
theoretically impossible for an economy ever to suffer a shortage of
demand, but does Krugman really need to take passing shots at Erskine
Bowles and Alan Simpson, the chairmen of the widely respected
bipartisan Bowles-Simpson Commission on deficit reduction appointed by
President Obama? Maybe his case for stimulating the economy in the
short run would be taken more seriously by those in power if it were
offered along with a Bowles-Simpson-style plan for improving America's
finances in the medium or long term. Instead, Krugman suggests
cavalierly that any extra government borrowing probably "won't have to
be paid off quickly, or indeed at all."

Bowles-Simpson is "widely respected"? They were rejected out of hand
by virtually all Republicans for even suggesting the need to raise taxes,
and they fared little better among Democrats for their insistence on
gutting what's left of the safety net. They're toxic enough that even
the president who appointed them had had virtually nothing to do with
them, although there's little reason to think that he wouldn't relish
a "grand bargain" of the sort they imagine if indeed they enjoyed any
respect at all.

The important thing to understand about any such "grand bargain" is
that the context precludes any real compromise. If left and right were
in some sort of equilibrium, some sort of tit-for-tat exchange could
be negotiated and might prove advantageous. However, since the mid-70s
we have been subjected to a systematic onslaught by moneyed interests
which has materially damaged the working class, permitted the rentier
class to greatly aggrandize its wealth, and undermined democracy here
and abroad, and every time you compromise with this onslaught you give
up ground, and hope.

At some level Krugman understands this. He does, after all, recall
a time -- he calls it the Great Compression -- when income and wealth
was much more equable in the U.S., and becoming more so, and he notes
that even such conventional economic indicators as GDP growth were
much stronger then than they've become under conservative hegemony.
And he also understands, and cares, that high unemployment rates
entail real human costs as well as economic ones. But Bishop's idea
that Krugman "the gifted economist" gives way to Krugman "the populist
polemicist" in this book is precisely wrong. Krugman focuses almost
exclusively on basic macroeconomics here. The irritating stylistics
is all Bishop's, as should be clear from the weasel-wording.

For instance, "the rise in unemployment may be largely the result
of inadequate demand": not "largely," but as Krugman shows, plainly.
The drop in demand is due to deleveraging, which is what happens when
an asset bubble bursts and everyone invested in it suddenly has to
retrench to recover solvency. Also, "the austerians may be excessively
fearful of so-called 'bond vigilantes'": Krugman shows that during
a liquidity trap -- the technical term for the desperate deleveraging
we are still in -- there can be no "bond vigilantes" because during
such times only government bonds are safe havens for investible cash.
Nor is this just theory: Krugman repeatedly points to actual interest
rates to show that there is no "bond vigilante" effect. (The Eurozone
is somewhat different in this respect, which Krugman also explains at
length.)

Krugman's assertion "that any extra government borrowing probably
'won't have to be paid off quickly, or indeed at all'" also isn't
cavalier: he points to historical examples where even greater debt
had little or no consequence. On the other hand, Bishop's insistence
that present unemployment has a "structural" component is nothing
but a hapless red herring. On the one hand, it's impossible to see
how a structural flaw would have manifested itself so suddenly as
the economy collapsed. On the other, such a problem could easily be
remedied by public investment to provide the missing skills, but no
one who talks about "structural" unemployment seems to want to fix
that particular problem.

Indeed, that's true of a lot of the things that Krugman's "Very
Serious People" say.
Mike Konczal has done useful work in mapping out the various
things all sides have to say about the current depression. He maps
them out into two clusters, one called "demand-based solutions" --
the sorts of things Krugman favors doing -- and "supply-based
explanations," which aren't solutions at all, just rationalizations
for letting the depression run its course. Krugman, of course, points
out the falsity of each of those arguments, but striking them down
is a futile task, because the right is committed to repeating them
endlessly -- whatever it takes to prevent politicians from trying to
solve the crisis by shifting wealth and power from those who have
too much to those who don't have nearly enough. And if that means
perpetuating the depression indefinitely, that's a price the rich
are fully prepared to let the poor pay.